The Lion King

The Circle Of Life 1

Helen O’Hara: A few shots are framed differently and it’s a little more leisurely, but this is the same sequence. It does make you marvel at the technology involved, but would it really have been less The Lion King if they had changed a few details? Have we discovered no interesting new facts about how wildlife on the Serengeti interact since 1994 that they could have added in? Even the detail is similar, with the same colour of bird landing on an elephant’s tusk as they walk through the watering hole.

The Elephant Graveyard 2

Ian Freer: The Elephant Graveyard scene, where Simba and Nala, disobeying orders, head out of the confines of Pride Rock to prove their bravery, is one of the more effective uses of the live-action aesthetic and improves on the original. The barren wasteland, which plays host to a stripped- back version of Scar’s song ‘Be Prepared’, provides a striking visual contrast to the sun-kissed beauty of the rest of the movie. The built-in-a-computer set has a real sense of foreboding and eerieness about it. It is, in modern parlance, a big mood.

Helen O’Hara: This is much more authentically volcanic-looking than the original. There are none of those glowing lava pits that you get in so many cartoons, which never seem terribly credible because, well, they’re just not. We get a much longer chase of little Simba and Nala by the hyenas before Mufasa arrives, but I’d say this actually improves on the original moment where Simba opens his mouth to roar, and we hear Mufasa’s growl instead.

THE STAMPEDE/ DEATH OF MUFASA 3

Ian Freer: The death of Mufasa is an example of how Jon Favreau borrows even the grammar and shot selection of Roger Allers and Rob Minkoff’s version watch the camera pull out on Simba’s face as he watches his father die. The scene is such a carbon copy that Hans Zimmer doesn’t even have to change a note of his score.

Helen O’Hara: At the risk of sounding geologically obsessed, they’ve done something interesting with the rock here, making it a really treacherous sedimentary rock that crumbles like fruit cake at the slightest pressure. There’s a parallel there, see? Treachery!

Ian Freer: Favreau’s decision to rigorously follow the 1994 template highlights an interesting difference from the way cinematic stories have evolved over the past 25 years. To use a wanky screenwriting term, the ‘inciting incident’, the thing that kicks the story into gear, is the death of Simba’s father but compared to contemporary storytelling it happens much later than we’ve become accustomed (which is usually within the first 10 minutes). It makes the early section seem sluggish by modern standards and you feel the drag with the extra half-hour on the running time. Helen O’Hara: It’s not so much that there are huge numbers of new scenes before this; just that lots of them are given more room to breathe. Think of that opening scene following the little mouse, aka Scar’s Wannabe Lunch, which was nowhere in the original. Here, Scar spends a little more time telling Simba why he has to stay in the gorge (it’s not so he can kill him, honest) so the build-up is prolonged as is our agony in waiting for that death, too. Some of these touches really help, I think. The poignant moment where Simba curls up next to his father’s lifeless body is genuinely moving, so it’s not all wasted time.

Scar and the hyenas: “Come and have a go...” etc; Mufasa’s in there somewhere…; The Elephant Graveyard — bit spooky, isn’t it?

Hakuna M Atata 4

Ian Freer: If you want to feel the difference between the two versions, the crossing-theriver shot in ‘Hakuna Matata’ (a hymn to not giving two shits) is instructive. In the original, there is bounce, spirit and joie de vivre as the fast friends go on their merry way; in the new version, it’s a carefully constructed biological study of animals walking across a log. Impressive but lifeless.

Helen O’Hara: I have so many unhelpful logical questions about this scene but then, I did in the original as well. How many grubs would a lion need to eat to grow 400lbs? The internet suggested he’d have to eat six a minute, 24 hours a day, which seems impractical.

The Neverending 5 Flight Of The Fur

6 Spirit

Helen O’Hara: If you hire Beyoncé, she’s going to record a new song. And if that means a Best Original Song Oscar next year, it’s a bonus!‘Spirit’is aiming for a‘Circle Of Life’ feel with lyrics involving heavens opening, destinies calling, and standing up and fighting. Stirring stuff, yes, but no instant classic.

Ian Freer: Something interesting starts happening as the song ad libs to fade. Timon and Pumbaa start riffing in a postmodern way “It’s our signature song”, “Now he’s riffing” as if the characters are aware of the song’s importance. A fun if bizarre choice for such a faithful, strait-laced production.

Helen O’Hara: Yes, but that improv from Seth Rogen and Billy Eichner is consistently fun, after all the power and plotting and tragedy we’ve had up to that point. That said, it does pose those meta questions. I’m still wondering how Timon can compare Zazu to a puffin a little later. How does he know what a puffin looks like?

Be Our Guest 7

Helen O’Hara: The original film had that self-referential moment where an imprisoned Zazu started to sing ‘It’s A Small World After All’, only to be mercifully cut off by Scar. The equivalent here is an inspired riff on ‘Be Our Guest’ from Beauty And The Beast as Timon serves Pumbaa to the hyenas by saying, “Allow me to present: your dinner,” in a French accent mimicking Beauty And The Beast’s Lumière. After starting the song — “Be…our…guest” — he quickly scarpers from the hyenas. The moment means we sidestep something that works in cartoon logic but not at all in this more grounded reality. The original Timon and Pumbaa somehow contrived a grass skirt, lei, apple and ukulele out of nowhere; this pair only have their wits. And yet it works at least as well.

Ian Freer: Taking a leaf (or feather) out of Robert Zemeckis’ book, Favreau traces a tuft of Simba’s fur from floating down river to being rolled on a dung beetle’s ball to being ferried along by ants to arriving at the nose of wise mandrill Rafiki (John Kani) who, with a Lassie-like sense of ESP, deduces that Simba is still alive. The moment is virtuosity for virtuosity’s sake and smacks of the Dr Ian Malcolm/Jeff Goldblum maxim: “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”

Helen O’Hara: I love the idea behind this, but it prompted questions about the speed food travels through a giraffe’s digestive system that I could have lived without contemplating.

Simba Vs Scar 8

Ian Freer: The final battle has some very 2019 flavours. It’s a sign of the times how Pumbaa’s trigger into action is specifically fat-shaming rather than more general disrespect (“You call me Mr PIG!”). One difference you could never have anticipated in Favreau’s new version is that Scar’s alliance with the hyenas smacks of modern-day politics, with leaders siding with any old scum to get them over the winning line. It makes Simba’s victory all the more satisfying.

Helen O’Hara: It only just occurred to me, watching this scene, that we don’t see a single lion kill anything larger than a grub not even Scar. I realise they’re the heroes, but these films may be giving kids a dangerously rosy view of lions. Still, it’s good to see that Rafiki picks up his staff (or Gandalf’s staff?) and still gets his moment of heroism.

THE PAST THREE DECADES HAVE SEEN MANY MASTERPIECES, BIG AND SMALL, JOIN THE MOVIE PANTHEON. OVER THE NEXT 30 PAGES WE CELEBRATE OUR FAVOURITE FILM FROM EACH YEAR, WITH HELP FROM THE PEOPLE WHO MADE THEM

THE SUMMER OF 1989 saw madness erupt all over the globe, and it was all thanks to a nocturnal mammal. “It was crazy, weird and bizarre,” says Sam Hamm, co-writer of Tim Burton’s Batman and one of the people responsible for the ensuing Batmania. “There’s nothing you could do but disassociate from it. To be honest, I found it kind of scary.

I was grateful when things calmed down a little bit.”

The project, a fresh bigscreen spin on the 1930s-created Caped Crusader, had been in development throughout the ’70s and ’80s, nobody quite sure how to make it work. CBS considered shooting a film where Batman went into space.

Bill Murray and Eddie Murphy were, at one point, suggested for Batman and Robin. Peter

O’Toole was in talks to play the Penguin. Then a gawky, geeky director named Tim Burton took the mantle, and things finally started slotting into place. Hamm, drafted in to put Burton’s dark but whimsical vision on the page, had a good feeling from the off. “I truthfully thought that Batman was ready to erupt as a phenomenon,” he says. “For a couple of years before the picture came out, you could not go down Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles without seeing young hipsters wearing Batman gear. Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns had just started coming out as Tim and

I got together. It was just this sort of presence in the air.” Even so, there were hiccups. The casting of Michael Keaton drew the ire of furious fans, who had been promised a moody film, an antidote to the camp ’60s Batman — then told the actor who would be suiting up was Mr Mom. “I admit, when I first heard the name Michael Keaton, I thought, ‘Really?!’” admits Hamm. “But when I thought about it for 15 minutes, I started to see it, because the deal is you don’t cast green K legend’s vi end, be rea secured af And as the quickly that pe

Top to bottom: Batman (Michael Keaton) meets the Joker (Jack Nicholson); Life’s a beach for the vaudevillian Joker; Burton’s decision to cast Keaton drew ire from fans.

Batman — you cast Bruce Wayne.” The writing process was complicated by Warner Bros. executives insisting Robin be crowbarred into the script (“Tim and I spent a weekend at my house in San Francisco wearing out the carpet with our pacing, trying to figure it out,” Hamm recalls), before the notion was dropped for budgetary reasons. And the casting of the Joker, the movie’s Big Bad, turned into a headbangingly protacted affair, with everyone from John Lithgow to Brad Dourif going for the role.

“Nicholson plays it as if he’s a vaudevillian who has contempt for his audience, and just wants to amuse himself,” extolls Hamm. “But it’s Keaton’s weight that allows him to go off the way he does.”

Batman hit big. In fact, it hit huge, making $412 million globally (enormous money at the time) and spawning a Prince soundtrack and endless merchandise (including Batman breakfast food, making him the first superhero to get both a serial and a cereal). “There was Bat-shit everywhere,” its writer laughs. “I felt like Bruce Wayne that summer, because I would look at it all and nod my head, but I couldn’t say, ‘That’s me! I’m Batman!’ One day I saw a house eight blocks from mine, whose owner had painted the façade black and had a Bat-signal on the garage. And I thought, ‘This has gone too far.’ A lot of our constituency were seriously cracked.”

The entire affair rocked Hollywood, and set the scene for the superhero-movie domination to come. Burton’s philosophy, taking these characters seriously and delving into their psychologies, would be pushed further by Christopher Nolan, although The Dark Knight would sadly fail to feature henchmen with matching Joker-jackets. Warner Bros.’ blizzard of merch would be repeated, and intensified, with subsequent Bat-movies featuring numerous changes of costumes in order to justify extra action figures.

Most of all, it proved that even the mustiest comic-book could be transformed, with the right filmmaker behind the wheel, into a four-quadrant blockbuster event. “Audiences now get to see in widescreen and colour and surround sound the most extravagant action sequences that you could have imagined when you were a child paging through a 15-cent comic book,” Hamm says. “Batman happened to come along and demonstrate that there was an appetite for that kind of material. And so now that’s the world we’re living in.”

NICK DE SEMLYEN

11 May is GoodFellas Day. Henry Hill’s final 24 hours as a wiseguy is played out in one epic sequence that ends when he’s busted by the Feds. Inspired by the voiceover in Truffaut’s Jules Et Jim, Martin Scorsese and Nicholas Pileggi’s narration delineates how the wired Hill can’t differentiate between anything; picking up his brother and making tomato sauce are as important as off-loading guns and the Pittsburgh drug deal everything’s on the same level to the strung-out gangster.

Stylistically, Scorsese is trying to give the audience the feeling of spinning recklessly out of control on drugs. Much of this is evoked by Michael Ballhaus’ restless camera movement. When Henry takes a hit of coke, the camera flies towards his eyes. Elsewhere, it whip-pans, zooms, then pans and zooms at the same time, never giving the audience a chance to settle.

When the camera finally does rest locked onto Hill inside his car it’s Liotta’s performance that provides the animation, all antsy tics and paranoia, as Hill tries to figure out if the helicopter above is really chasing him. Liotta is a whirling dervish throughout the sequence, a dishevelled wreck compared to the sharp-suited young man we met at the beginning. He is manic intensity personified listen to his cackle as he leaves Sandy’s (Debi Mazar) house.

Adding to Hill’s frenzy is editor Thelma Schoonmaker’s work, always cutting on movement, never letting things settle. Taking their cue from the French New Wave and Bernardo Bertolucci’s Before The Revolution, she and Scorsese use jump-cuts to highlight Hill’s jitteriness (as when he is forced to brake quickly) or compress time to mirror his lack of control. At the key turningpoint in the sequence when Lois (Welker White) uses the home phone to call about the drop, letting the Feds in on the action the moment is crystallised in freeze-frame, as if the celluloid itself understands that Henry’s fate is sealed. GoodFellas became the first Scorsese film to be shown to preview audiences by a studio: the overwhelming response was that the Last Day set-piece left them ‘agitated’ this is mostly down to Schoonmaker’s cutting.

Ever the music-lover, Scorsese mashes up six songs into the 11-minute sequence, his rule of thumb being it could only be music heard at that time. Sometimes the lyrics ape the action. When the baby is put in the pram for the drug smuggling, the Rolling Stones’ ‘Monkey Man’ kicks in, the first lyric opining with ‘I’m a flea-bit peanut monkey and all my friends are junkies’. Elsewhere it runs the gamut from the explosive rock of Harry Nilsson’s ‘Jump Into The Fire’ (as Henry leaves the house) to the exquisite Ry Cooder slide guitar on Mick Jagger’s ‘Memo From Turner’ (Henry puts a gun in boot) to the hard-as-nails blues of Muddy Waters’ ‘Mannish Boy’ (Henry snorts coke). The result is a beautifully choreographed mini rock opera. Play it loud and proud every 11 May. IAN FREER walking out with my mate Fergus, and saying, ‘Anything’s possible now.’ Which, looking back, was true. Terminator 2 fundamentally did things that absolutely could not be done before.

Top to bottom: No bars held for the switchflipping new Terminator, the T-1000 (Robert Patrick); And then things heat up...; Reflecting on the scariest bad guy in an age; A good old T-800. wh

“To me, the most exciting thing about visual effects is when it’s applied intelligently to storytelling and isn’t just spectacle for the sake of it. That moment when the T-1000 Marvel Studios VFX supervisor Jake Morrison remembers how seeing the morphing-machine madness of Terminator 2 changed his life

“I WAS 16 or 17 when I first Terminator 2, at the ABC in Surrey. This was well before visual effects was a focus o interest, because in those d it didn’t exist as a thing you could aim for. I remember t Patrick es through the bars is extremely aw days u

“We’d previously seen the water creature in The Abyss, and the stained-glasswindow knight in Young Sherlock Holmes, but this was the first time we’d seen CGI used to pay off the idea that ‘they could look like any of us’. You really believed it when he walked out of the crash, flames were everywhere, and he turned from this silver figure into a fully formed Robert Patrick. That storytelling technique had been around for donkey’s years you’d do a little turn away from camera and you cut back and there’s a makeup change but to sustain that, and be able to see that on camera, is really key for me.

“I recently referenced the reservoir bike chase with my team on [Taika Waititi’s] Akira, but I still watch Terminator 2, even outside of work, usually while exercising in my gym. It’s a treat. It’s highly addictive. And while I wasn’t planning to work in visual effects when I first saw it, I do think it flipped a switch, turned a few little levers and cogs in my head. It was a game-changer for me, for sure.”

Back in 1992, Empire met an excitable unknown director named Quentin Tarantino. These were our first impressions of the man who’d soon conquer Hollywood.

TALL, RANGY AND sporting an unkempt thatch of hair, Quentin Tarantino is not your immediate idea of a “man of the moment”.

Tucked away in the corner of a Whitehall pub, he is more interested in this, his third pint of draught Guinness, than buying into the Next Big Thing malarkey. Probably because he wolfed down too many E numbers as a child, Tarantino is extremely animated. He is also eminently likeable, which probably explains how he got away without a dressing-down from the world’s number-one female recording artist [Madonna], having described her as a “regular fuck machine” in his script Speaking quickly in a voice not unlike that of Mickey Dolenz and punctuating his enthusiasm “It’s a really incendiary movie, you can’t show it to an audience without getting a reaction” with words like “man” and “cool”, he really is rather proud of his creation.

So he should be. The 29year-old writer-director has come a long way in the last couple of years. After training as an actor and enduring various false starts on the production side of things (his first job was as an assistant on a Dolph Lundgren video, literally clearing the dog shit out of the car park so Dolph wouldn’t get his trainers dirty), he spent six years killing time in an LA video shop until one day, out of pure frustration, he began to hatch a big idea.

“It’s a simple fact that I get a kick out of heist films, so I thought I’d write one,” begins Tarantino matter-of-factly. “I’d had the idea in my head about a film that doesn’t take place during the robbery, but in the rendezvous afterwards. When I worked at the video store we had this one shelf that was like a revolving film festival and every week I would change it. And one time I had heist films, like Rififi and Topkapi and The Thomas Crown Affair I started taking them home and it was in the context of seeing a heist movie every night that I put my head round what a neat genre that would be to redo.”

The Guinness long forgotten, Tarantino is now in full swing.

“The thing about heist films is they have this built-in suspense mechanism,” he babbles, “even with something like Treasure Of The Four Crowns, you know, that crazy 3D movie, it’s like, ‘Oh my God, they’re getting too close to the beam,’ and you get real nervous, so I thought, ‘Okay, I’m gonna do one of these.’ And I thought I’d write one where they all got away, ’cause I hated it I hated it where they’d do the robbery and by some little quirk, fate steps in and fucks ’em over.”

Idea firmly implanted, Tarantino scarpered off to the stationery shop and purchased a set of felt-tip pens and a notebook “You can’t write poetry on a computer” declaring to his gobsmacked mates that these were the tools with which he was going to create a masterpiece and, over the course of three weeks, he bashed out a script. Backed by residuals from the repeat fees of an episode of The Golden Girls in which he had played an Elvis impersonator, Tarantino ran his idea by producer chum Lawrence Bender and, armed with $30,000 and a 16mm camera, set about making his movie.

JEFF DAWSON

the best prehistoric apex predator she could be. A roaring apogee of dinoflesh made real.

DAN JOLIN, CONTRIBUTING EDITOR

inhalations lift him up and down. When he calls her ‘the most beautiful thing I ever saw’, I can only agree. She’s one sick Trike. BEN TRAVIS, ONLINE STAFF WRITER

SO ASTONISHING ARE the film’s effects, it’s still hard not to believe that Spielberg and co rocked up to an actual secret tropical island and just filmed the creatures they found there. Five Empire writers select the dinosaur closest to their heart.

None of the BC beasts is more tangible than the Triceratops. She reacts with astonishing realism thanks to some flawless puppeteering, both convincingly alive and visibly unwell, creating the sort of heart-filled spectacle that Spielberg does best. She brings out the best in the characters Ellie’s compassion and curiosity, Tim’s excitement, Alan’s bliss as its

The truly unforgettable menace is its Velociraptors, cunning hunters able to creep into human habitats and ferret out any hiding places. To the T-Rex, humans are barely worthy of notice; the Dilophosaurus and Compys are small enough that you could at least hope to fight them off. But the Raptors are made to prey on us. The sense that humanity has met its match is bone-deep, and it utterly terrified me.

HELEN O’HARA, EDITOR-AT-LARGE

The dinosaur that still hits me right in my otherwise fossilised heart remains the Brachiosaurus. Its introduction is a perfect dino-cinematic moment: the flabbergasted faces of Dr Alan Grant and Dr Ellie Sattler; the swelling, soaring strings of John Williams’ theme; and towering above them all, the full, enormous scale of the gentle sauropod, as stunning as it was in 1993. You crazy sonofabitch, Spielberg, you did it!

JOHN NUGENT, NEWS EDITOR

I grew up on the films of Ray Harryhausen. I grew up on monsters. I also grew up on wildlife programmes, and thanks to Steven Spielberg, Stan Winston and Dennis Muren’s artistry, the T-Rex was more than a monster. She was an animal, driven only by her flesh-rending instinct to be

When night falls and the foliage starts twitching, the park’s freakiest denizen comes out to play. The fact the Dilophosaurus is an obscure dino gave the creature shop licence to tweak the design, adding a rattling neck-frill and deadly saliva. I’ve always loved the setpiece in which IT dork Nedry patronises the gawky beast, before suddenly waking up, too late, to its true nature. Still no idea how it gets into the car, though. NICK

DE SEMLYEN, ASSOCIATE EDITOR (FEATURES)

THE SHAWSHANK

REDEMPTION, to adapt a line from its narrator, is a film that crawled through a river of shit and came out on the other side. Commercially ignored upon release, Frank Darabont’s adaptation of a little-known Stephen King prison-set novella has become widely considered one of the greatest films of all time: beautifully acted, uplifting, a film that makes you believe in the power of hope. Here, director Darabont reflects on the long journey of his beloved debut film.

Shawshank is one of the films of our lifetime. How does that make you feel?

Buoyant and delighted and extremely grateful. Gosh, it was so long ago now. Twenty-five years. Twenty-six, I guess, since we shot it. To know that it’s had this kind of lasting effect on people is exceptionally gratifying.

It’s now a film you can refer to by just one word, “Shawshank”. [Laughs] You know, that makes us like Liza or Barbra.

Did you imagine that it would become an important film for many people?

I never really looked that far ahead. When you’re shooting a movie, you have no idea.

I thought we had a good script. But there were days on the set where I thought, “Boy, I feel like I’m really screwing this up.”

Oh, really?

Oh God, yeah. You know, I had a very fascinating encounter with [Kramer Vs. Kramer director]

Robert Benton the year it came out, at the Berlin Film Festival. He remembered being a first-time director, and he said, “How do you like it?” And I said, “I don’t know that I ever want to do this again.” He said, “You know, that’s par for the course. Every day of filming feels like a failure. But that doesn’t mean that you’re failing. You know, if you’re being true to the script

[of Andy Dufresne’s wife and lover]. And I realised, “I need two more nights here. I’ve only got one.” I got the most important shots I could think of. Richard Francis-Bruce, the brilliant editor, and I were banging our heads against the Steenbeck for months, trying to figure out how to cut it together. Then one morning I thought, “Why don’t we just do it as a courtroom scene and use the shots I got as little flashback moments?” It worked a treat.

Did you change your approach in directing as you went along?

The one thing I did learn on Shawshank is how different every actor is. Tim [Robbins] was a text book example of that. He’s a very intellectual guy. He needs to talk about the scene to come. He needs conceptual conversation, he needs more information.

Morgan [Freeman] is the other way around. I remember about halfway through the shoot I was talking about a scene to come, and Morgan was being very polite and listening. But I could see his eyes glazing a little. And I stopped and said, “Morgan, let me ask you something. You don’t really need all this conversation, do you?” And he goes, “No, not really. I just need you to tell me when to stand, when to sit. And do I turn left or do I turn right?” And I went, “Good lesson to learn.” and the actors are being true to the text, you could wind up with something pretty darn good.”

We’re in the middle of a glut of Stephen King adaptations at the moment. You were ahead of the King curve.

Which is true.

It is. But every day of filming did feel like a failure. One great example is the opening of Shawshank, which if you read the script was very much two blocks of consecutive narration. And my very first night of shooting on the movie was the night of the murder

I guess I was. I’d love to go back to that. If Steve ever comes up with another Green Mile, I’d love to do another piece with him. And God knows one can’t have this conversation without complimenting him on having written a brilliant, wonderful, humanistic, heartwarming story. Without Steve King, I doubt I ever would have really directed. He’s been the patron saint of my career.

CHRIS HEWITT

IT COULD’VE BEEN just a chilly, technical exercise in computergenerated imagery, but instead Toy Story became one of the most heartfelt, resonant films of the 1990s. A hellish production period, forging a path into untested territory, taught the studio the essential elements they would need to establish the most successful animation house in history...

Pixar had been a software company for its first decade of existence, with John Lasseter’s short films designed chiefly to showcase the company’s image-rendering product. Stepping into feature animation required an untested team to do something that was at least when they started impossible. So, inspired by the success of the short Tin Toy, Pixar chose a story that their technology could (theoretically) handle: toy characters composed of mostly hard, shiny surfaces. As the tech progressed, so would the subject matter: fish! Furry monsters! Superheroes! But the state of the art shaped those films even as their ambition steadily pushed the limits of what computers could do.

As well as Disney-trained animator Lasseter, Pixar was blessed with the business mind of Steve Jobs and the technical genius of Ed Catmull. The core Pixar brain trust began to coalesce around that trio: Pete Docter went with Lasseter to a Robert McKee screenwriting seminar; Andrew Stanton shaped the story, and Lee Unkrich handled the edit. Disney veteran Joe Ranft proved key in finding the humour and heart. Outsider Joss Whedon came in to write dialogue and key characters, adding Rex and Barbie and giving Buzz his blissful delusions.

Pixar’s genius lay in realising that visual dazzle was not enough: the story also had to sing. They were well into development on the spaceman toy which would threaten an existing equilibrium, when artist Bud Luckey suggested that the other lead should be a cowboy. It gave the film its mismatched buddy dynamic, added a nostalgic hit for two generations of adults, and had a certain logic. They were, said Lasseter, “both classic American heroes exploring wild frontiers”, albeit frontiers in Andy’s room. That buddy dynamic would become Pixar’s default, on the template established by Tom Hanks’ decent, fretful Woody and Tim Allen’s blithely ignorant Buzz.

At a time when Disney was reliant on fairy tales and no other feature animations seemed interested in entertaining adults as well as kids, Pixar aimed at every demographic. While kids thrilled to the bright colours and silly antics, parents could enjoy the pin-sharp dialogue. “The word I’m searching for I can’t say, because there’s preschool toys present,” sighs Woody, and the film gets meta when Rex claims, “I’m from Mattel. Well, I’m not really from Mattel, I’m actually from a smaller company that was purchased by Mattel in a leveraged buyout.”

All filmmaking is about the versions you don’t show, but that’s particularly true for Pixar’s early films. The studio put together roughly storyboarded and animated scenes to keep track of how the work was going, but when they did so a year in, they realised they’d lost the film entirely. Woody was, in Hanks’ terms, “really a jerk”. Lasseter and the team had been trying to follow Disney notes, looking for an edgy, teen-friendly tone, and had lost sight of their own goals. They had a come-to-Jesus moment and decided that, if they were going to fail, it would be on their own terms. In a few weeks, they retooled the first third of the film and found Toy Story and the mantra that would shape the studio: fail early, fail often. But and this is key don’t fail in the end.

HELEN O’HARA

Corin Hardy, director of The Hallow and The Nun, recalls how seeing Wes Craven’s meta murder-thon for the first time blew his mind.

WHEN WES CRAVEN decided to spoiler! murder Drew Barrymore in the opening ten minutes of Scream, it was just the start of a series of smart and very considered wrongfootings that would play on the common traits of the slasher movies of the past 30 years (from Black Christmas, through Halloween and Craven’s own A Nightmare On Elm Street). But ultimately Scream would draw in a much wider audience than the films it had satirised, leading to a mega metafranchise and changing the landscape of scary movies from that point on.

That point was 1996. I was in my second year of a Theatre Design Degree at Wimbledon School of Art, majoring in Special Effects For The Stage & Screen. Effectively I was training to become a monstermaker, prosthetic FX artist, sculptor, and possibly even a horror filmmaker. A little bit like Jamie Kennedy’s character Randy from the film, I was the geeky guy that knew everything about horror movies.

Above: Courteney Cox, Jamie Kennedy and Neve Campbell, er, scream their heads off.

ALAMY, SHUTTERSTOCK

However, I heard about Scream from someone else, a girl on my course who wasn’t a horror fan, and this kind of threw me. I can only liken the feeling to when one of your favourite lesser-known bands scores a hit single; suddenly everybody loves them and you get a little bit sad or maybe even angry because y k w that from that day o world will be differen course, in Scream’s was ultimately for th absolute better, but a walked to the cinema the following night, I wasn’t prepared for what I was about to experience. you know n, the nt. Of case t s e as I o I’m sitting there, the hardened horror fiend surrounded by this mainstream crowd, trying to play it all cool and eat my popcorn, maan, when suddenly the film starts satirising all the things I loved about horror and turning them upside down. I felt my world marginally beginning to shift. I could feel that this was a significant moment for a genre I loved Craven had done something risky and dangerous and clever as sin. And I think only he could really have done it that well, because he had lived inside its constraints for so long.

Even at the Wimbledon Odeon, the energy at that screening was palpable from the off. A few seconds into the film as the title appeared in red everyone started to m and then immediately And that repeated hout the movie’s entire e, like a maniacal drug.

Scream was responsible for opening up the world of horror and exposing its flaws but in a respectful, knowledgeable and bitingly brilliant way, whilst managing to pull off a crazy-fun, genuinely scary, coherent story, as well as creating another iconic anti-hero in ‘Ghostface’ — a mask based on Edvard Munch’s famous ‘The Scream’ painting. When I finally made my own first and second horror movies [The Hallow and The Nun], I came to fully appreciate how important it is for horror to be able to transform and transcend and reinvent.

I never met Wes Craven, but if I had I would have thanked him for creating some of the most indelible horror movies of all time, and for deftly walking a genre tightrope, balancing horror and the mainstream so that we could all benefit. There is maybe no better example of this connection than Scream

Craven is the master.

1997 WAS A cool year for cinema. What were the auteurs doing?

L.A. Confidential Boogie Nights. Jackie Brown. Lost Highway This was independent spirit writ large, the indie boom having blossomed big-time. Even the blockbusters Face/ Off, Men In Black, The Fifth Element, Starship Troopers, Con Air were postmodern, satirical and hip (as always, let’s forget Batman & Robin ever happened). But the biggest film of them all? It was so wonderfully uncool.

Until this point, James Cameron had been pretty cool himself all of his directorial output was genre work, sometimes sci-fi, sometimes action, mostly both. Now, though, he wanted to make an old-fashioned romantic drama. Nobody expected this to work, including, eventually, Cameron himself: as the troubled production dragged on (160 arduous days), the budget ballooned (to a then record-breaking $200 million) and the release date loomed like a lethal iceberg, he became convinced his period epic would lose the studio $100 million. The film, said everyone, would be as disastrous as the ship.

Cameron, though, stood by his guns throughout, and his gamble blindsided everybody. It takes a dead heart not to succumb to Titanic’s purity, its charm, its astonishing absence of cynicism. Even ‘My Heart Will Go On’ (performed by Celine Dion in just one take, as a demo) is the business. There was no room for cool here. This was one for the ages.

Boat-sinking spectacle aside, Titanic hinges on Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet’s chemistry, and they are never not heartbreaking together, particularly, of course, at the end: that tragedy is, surely, what makes the film endure. If you’re not welling up at the mere memory of it, you’re a danger to society.

The first film to hit a billion at the box office, by 1998 it had become the highest-grossing film of all time, ending up with $2.187 billion (including re-release money, twice, but still). It won 11 of its 14 nominated Oscars, resulting in Cameron’s misunderstood “I’m the king of the world!” moment on stage even if you do read it as a lack of humility, you have to hand it to him, taking home the big ones for the film everyone bet against.

DiCaprio went stratospheric after Titanic. An indie darling up until then, he’d become a heartthrob thanks to 1996’s Romeo + Juliet, but that was small fry compared to this. Danny Boyle, Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg all came knocking. Winslet, meanwhile, retreated, favouring a smaller spotlight with indie fare like Hideous Kinky and Holy Smoke Both of their careers would find balance in time.

Cameron’s Titanic keeps on sailing, forever being parodied Empire had The League Of Gentlemen’s Tubbs and Edward take it on for a photoshoot a couple of years ago, while James Corden and Celine Dion recreated it just a few months back. It is truly iconic.

Do they make films like this anymore? Not really. Then again, they weren’t making them in 1997 either. But Cameron’s never been one to follow the herd. He wouldn’t direct a feature film for another 12 years. He didn’t need to.

A MAN DONNING a baseball cap shouldn’t be significant. But when Mahershala Ali walked on stage in Hall H at the tail-end of Marvel Studios’ Comic-Con presentation just a couple of months ago, and nonchalantly placed a cap on his head with a logo that revealed not only that Marvel was planning a Blade movie, but that he a two-time Academy Award winner, no less was going to play the title role, it was laden with significance.

Because Blade is where, in a roundabout way, the Marvel Cinematic Universe began. When discussing the origins of the MCU, and the larger comic-book movie bubble (which still shows no signs of slowing its expansion, let alone popping), the illinformed will often cite

Sam

Raimi’s Spider-Man in daylight, is to rid the world of bloodsucking bastards. e were y

Above: Blade (Wesley Snipes) takes on the henchvamps.

Right: Sometimes a half-human, half-vampire just needs to take his top off.

And yes, that film was a huge hit, with a record-breaking opening weekend and a host of copycats in its wake. Or they’ll go back two years before that, to Bryan Singer’s X-Men. But before either of those, another Marvel movie paved the way. The first Marvel movie, in fact. Blade is not anyone’s idea of a top-tier Marvel character. Back in 1998, when the movie came out, no kids were going to school with Blade lunchboxes. Unless they w deeply cool/weird (delete as applicable). Blade is, after all, not a particularly kid-friendly character, being a half-human, half-vampire whose driving purpose in life, made easier by an ability to walk around an up-a at the k Norring music v megaph at the

Undeterred, Marvel set the movie up at New Line Cinema with David S. Goyer — then nd-coming writer — eyboard, Stephen ton, an in-demand video director, at the hone, and Wesley Snipes e silver stake. Snipes had tried to get Black Panther movie off the ground, to no avail, but jumped at the chance to bring Blade

— real name Eric Brooks, so you can see why he prefers the flashy nickname — to the big screen. (There’s a sense with Blade that racial politics aren’t as much to the fore as they are with Black Panther, but it still seems important that the lead of the first major Marvel movie was African-American, 20 years before Black Panther finally arrived.)

The result is not a perfect movie, but one that is incredibly slick, entertaining, and very cool. Watching Snipes, clad in his armour, long, black leather coat, taking out wave after wave of henchvamps, is a reminder of a great, ultimately wasted talent: an actor who was every bit as comfortable with being an action star. Of course, it’s possible that someone would have broken the seal on Marvel’s incredible back catalogue sooner or later, but consider this: if Blade didn’t make $70 million in the States, showing Hollywood that there was gold in them thar hills, there would be no X-Men, no Spider-Man, no Iron Man, or Captain America, or Avengers, or Black Panther, or Captain Marvel or — yes — Mahershala Ali, a worthy successor to Snipes, walking onto the stage at Hall H, and bringing things full circle with nothing more than a baseball cap. All hail the Daywalker, star of the most important comic-book movie of Empire’s lifetime.

CHRIS HEWITT

Above: Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) and Neo (Keanu Reeves) make fetishwear cool again. Left: Agent Jones (Robert Taylor) illustrates why firepower alone sometimes isn’t enough. Below: He needs guns; lots of guns.

worked as Keanu Reeves’ stunt double on the film. “It made [real] action an essential part of big-budget, high-concept films. Action especially martial-arts action was no longer a low-budget, genre affair. It could look and felt big and stylised and cool.”

WHAT IS THE Matrix?

On paper, it’s high-concept hokum. A cyberpunk thriller soaked in pseudo-philosophy, with a pair of little-known directors pushing camera tricks as the film’s central gimmick. When the Wachowskis pitched the movie to Will Smith, that was certainly his impression, and the reason he turned down the role of Neo to star in Barry Sonnenfeld’s Wild Wild West instead. But the Wachowskis’ first movie, neo-noir Bound, had been critically lauded, and that gave the pair just enough juice to convince Warner Bros. that their sci-fi vanity project, fronted by Keanu Reeves instead, might just be worth the risk.

The gamble paid off. And then some. With that flo-mo kick from Carrie-Ann Moss’ Trinity, sending Agent Brown (Robert Taylor) flying across a room in the film’s prologue, the Wachowskis set out their stall. The directors’ innovative concept harnessed the martial-arts spectacle of Hong Kong action cinema and — thanks to visionary VFX whizz John Gaeta enhanced it with bleeding-edge CGI to create something that felt entirely new. The ‘Bullet Time’ ‘gimmick’ transformed the movie’s set-pieces from simple adrenaline hits to zen-like art form: a soaring ballet of fists and bullets painstakingly choreographed by action master Yuen Woo-ping.

“The Matrix completely changed action in cinema,” recalls John Wick director Chad Stahelski, who

Cool it was. All shades, black leather and PVC, The Matrix wrapped its gun porn in fetishwear, the achingly stylish heroes performing superhuman feats while looking preternaturally sharp. But while it oozed style, it was never short of substance.

The film’s ‘pseudo-philosophy’ proved anything but, with the Wachowskis prescribing Baudrillard as required reading on set, and exploring the themes of his Simulacra And Simulation through the prism of accessible sci-fi.

Long before Inception dared to twist our understanding of what is and isn’t real, the Wachowskis turned blockbusters existential, adding layer upon layer to the film’s transformative mythology, daring audiences to find out just how deep the rabbit hole goes.

In offering a complex, thought-provoking story with revolutionary fight work and effects, the Wachowskis showed just what an action movie was capable of. Their action didn’t supplement the narrative but drove it, dispelling the assumption that intelligence and spectacle could not co-exist. That the film’s two sequels failed to live up to the original’s promise is regrettable, but neither Reloaded nor Revolutions can detract from the first film’s achievement.

“There probably isn’t a frame I shoot that hasn’t been influenced by my experience on The Matrix,” says Stahelski. “The framing, the look, the work ethic needed to create a cinematic world, the world-building. That and the philosophy that your imagination is truly the only limit out there.”

Christian Bale, it’s a surface that’s endlessly hypnotic.

Even now, in the age of Instagram selfies and hyper-narcissistic ‘influencers’, Bateman’s morning skincare routine is eyebrow-raising. (Don’t forget to tweeze those eyebrows.) His excessive, obsessive regime takes in a herb-mint facial mask, an anti-ageing eye balm and a water-activated gel cleanser. The sequence pushes something usually commendable taking care of your hygiene into weird, terrifying territory. As for the character’s intense friendliness when he’s out in public, Harron has said that Bale was inspired by watching Tom Cruise on a talk show.

The character’s fixation on details extends to his work life. In one of the film’s funniest scenes, American Psycho’s bankers compete with each other over their business cards. “Look at that subtle off-white colouring,” we hear Bateman think as he regards a particularly impressive bit of paper. “The tasteful thickness of it. Oh my God, it even has a watermark…” The sight of a victim screaming for mercy may fail to move him, but a smooth, uncoated paper stock stirs his soul. Ironically, there are errors on his own card: “acquisitions” is misspelled, and there is a space missing in the name of his company.

The Matrix altered audience perception of what is real, as much through spectacle as mind-bending narrative. Depicting action in a manner that Western audiences had rarely seen before, the film, like its hero, dared to show us a world without rules and controls, without borders or boundaries. A world where anything is possible.

MOST ICONIC MOVIE monsters are not renowned for their grooming. You wouldn’t seek moisturising tips from Frankenstein’s Monster, or ask Pinhead if you can borrow his lip balm. The exception to the rule is Patrick Bateman, the immaculately turned-out and dispassionately homicidal protagonist of American Psycho Mary Harron’s 2000 satirical horror movie, based on the Bret Easton Ellis novel, is a character study of a man who isn’t really a man; as he explains in chilling voiceover, “There is an idea of a Patrick Bateman; some kind of abstraction. But there is no real me: only an entity, something illusory... I simply am not there.” He’s all soulless surface but in the hands of Harron and star

JAMES DYER

Bateman’s work-out routine is similarly deranged: he likes to do 1,000 crunches before hitting the office, ideally in front of a television showing the climax of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre To acquire the correct physique, Bale had to transform his body, working with a personal trainer for three hours a day, six days a week. The results are astonishing although in the film the only person who seems to take pleasure from them are Bateman himself, leering at his reflection in a mirror as he has sex with two prostitutes.

Bateman’s other passion: Phil Collins. In fact, he seems to be obsessed with ’80s pop music in general. It’s left ambigious as to whether he sincerely loves these tunes, or is just trying to fit in and appear more normal, but one thing is certain: his monologue about Huey Lewis’ discography as he prepares to dismember rival Paul Allen (Jared Leto) with an axe is both disturbing and hilarious. “Mary’s approach to it as a satire a look at the social etiquette of the era, rather than a movie about a serial killer was exactly what I wanted to do,” Bale told Empire in 2009. “It was one of the most fun movies I’ve ever shot.”

NICK DE SEMLYEN

In 2001, Empire ran its first major report on Peter Jackson’s The Lord Of The Rings trilogy. This excerpt gives a sense of the scale and intensity of the high-risk endeavour — not to mention the passion that was being poured into it.

AS THE SHOOT wore on and the pressure mounted, Jackson could be seen cycling from set to set at the Wellington studio on an old bicycle, eager to save time. Orlando Bloom remembers one miraculous day when he traversed the whole country by helicopter to get to his next shot, complete with stick-on ears and blond wig. Promised breaks came and went, six-day weeks of 14- to 15-hour days became the norm. And somehow throughout it all, spinning every plate, Jackson just kept going.

“I’m totally unfit, but I’m the tortoise guy who can keep plodding on. Mentally I had days when my brain would feel like it was mush, I felt I had no imagination left. When your imagination starts to lock, you panic. Honestly, there were days when I was just turning to the actors and hoping they weren’t as tired as I was, and pointing the camera at them hoping we were getting good stuff.”

The cast, too, felt the pressure, sick of sticking on their Hobbit feet, sick of the outdoors, just completely knackered. Working together under such extremes, in an elemental, beautiful environment like New Zealand, combined with the spiritual rub-off of a storyline about a group of disparate personalities uniting for a common cause, was bound to bring them close. But these were friendships cast in stone.

“Because of the length of time, the unceasing grind of it,” says Viggo Mortensen, “we came to know each other’s good and bad points. You became entangled in each other’s lives in a good way. I felt that I became part of them and they became part of me.”

The Hobbits in particular became their own band of brothers. When not sh ti they learned to surf they took trips to Th and Australia, they w skiing, snowboarding white-water rafting and bungee jumping

They referred to themselves as Hobb

“We became frie life,” says Sean Astin shooting together, hailand went g, its. ends for n, who had his family with him for the duration. “They were like uncles to my daughter. Art imitated life or life imitated art, or something.”

Above: Panicky moments as the Black Rider nearly discovers are little heroes.

Left: Sir Ian McKellen, hatted and cloaked up as Gandalf The Grey.

Below: Viggo Mortensen’s Aragorn takes aim.

Consequently, away from the camera, much hilarity was to be had. Sean Bean (a devout Sheffield United fan) would find himself frequently nutmegged by Dominic Monaghan (a devout Manchester United fan) during on-set football tournaments. The pair even enticed Mortensen back to the 20th century to watch England vs Germany in Euro 2000, via satellite. Monaghan returned one afternoon to find his trailer sealed up with police tape, care of Mortensen. He returned the favour by smothering the front of Aragorn’s trailer in shaving foam and tracing the words, “false king!”

“W would do this thing he Fellowship had to do ” laughs Monaghan, t person on set, we l scream their name. we were waiting for Ian McKellen, the whole of the Fellowship would start going, ‘Oh, we are just waiting for

Ian McKellen!’”

To commemorate the experience, the entire Fellowship got matching tattoos of the Elvish symbol for nine.

Naturally, any triumph of good over evil was going to require much pummelling, slashing and delivering of ugly enemies unto their makers. Thus the Fellowship were given expert training for months before shooting. For the swordplay, Bob Anderson (who once taught Errol Flynn, no less) would put them through their paces. Bloom, who had to be a brilliant archer, spent his time firing arrows at paper plates in a unique spin on skeet shooting. As the shoot progressed and relationships developed with the stuntmen, the white heat of battle soon became second nature. “We got to know people’s body language so well that we got faster and faster, took more chances. It was like a dance partner you’ve worked with a long time,” says Mortensen.

But, given Jackson’s previous form, just how bloodthirsty could it get?

“We pushed it as far as we could,” says Jackson slyly. Making the Orc blood black rather than red has allowed him some latitude. “It’s a PG, but I am pushing it...”

On 19 December 2001, The Fellowship Of The Ring will be released on 10,000 screens worldwide, and John RhysDavies, at least, is convinced the biggest opening ever is assured. At the 2001 Empire Awards, he confidently bet Empire a bottle of fine vino on this very issue. Jackson, meanwhile, will not be drawn. He just hopes people partake of some of the joy of his journey.

“Hitchcock gave my favourite quote: ‘Where some people’s movies are slices of life, mine are slices of cake.’ I think that sums up what films should really do.”

This time, though, it’s the whole damn dessert trolley on offer.

IAN NATHAN

FOR A FILM full of stink spirits, faceless ghosts, dragon boys and kimono-wearing frogs, Spirited Away seems oddly real.

Sure, Hayao Miyazaki’s 2001 Studio Ghibli animation is set in a magical dreamland accessed through an abandoned amusement park, one where parents are turned into pigs and sentient balls of soot scurry around characters’ feet. But to anyone able to recall the emotions of growing up, Spirited Away felt familiar: a fantasy rooted in the reality of being a kid, in an oversized world that at once enchants and terrifies. The film follows Chihiro, a cherub-cheeked 10-year-old forced to leave her friends and move to a new town. En route, her family happens upon a strange woodland and set out to explore. Soon, Chihiro finds herself lost in a supernatural realm decorated with exquisite bathhouses and bizarre creatures, some of whom mean her harm.

So far, so Alice In Wonderland But Spirited Away’s combination of jaw-dropping visuals, bittersweet music and deliciously dreamy storytelling (Miyazaki famously never wrote scripts, preferring to storyboard from his imagination instead) set it apart. The film struck a uniquely floaty tone that enraptured audiences, becoming a hit at home and abroad. Four years earlier, Miyazaki had entertained Japanese audiences with Princess Mononoke, an epic fable about warring forest tribes. This follow-up was even bigger, blasting its way to the all-time Japanese box-office record and becoming a cult smash with Western audiences too.

John Lasseter was in part to thank for this: it was the Pixar head honcho who persuaded Disney to buy the distribution rights and put a dubbed version of the film in Western cinemas in 2003. Awards glory followed: to this day, it’s the only hand-drawn and non-English-language animation to have won Best Animated Feature at the Oscars. More important than its awards haul, however, is its legacy. In 2019, it’s regularly referenced as one of the most charming and bewitching films ever. A recent run in Chinese theatres saw it hold off Toy Story 4 at the top of the box office. With Studio Ghibli’s future unclear and the director’s days as a filmmaker presumed over, it’s viewed today as the definitive Miyazaki fairy tale: a whimsical feast for the senses that whisks you off to another place, just as its title promised.

Like Mononoke, it packed an environmentally conscious message about the fragile beauty of our natural surroundings, and man’s knack for stomping all over that beauty. Humans are reduced to slobbering animals in Spirited Away, which also features a river-monster made of pollution and calming beats where characters are allowed to gaze admiringly at the streams, sunsets and plant life in front of them. Miyazaki described these moments as ‘ma’ pockets of purposeful emptiness, that give the movie room to breathe.

Miyazaki is rumoured to have recently stepped out of retirement to work on one last film: How Do You Live?, his swansong, supposedly due in 2020. Whether it can reach the heights of Spirited Away, a film that still soars like Haku’s dragon, is unknown. Whatever happens, at least we’ll always have this, a coming-of-age cartoon reverie that perfectly captures the terror and wonder of being a kid.

AL HORNER

THERE WERE BIGGER films in 2003 this was the year of Finding Nemo and The Return Of The King and those more garlanded, the final Lord Of The Rings film winning a whopping 11 Oscars. But while in January of that year, if you were to overhear film connoisseurs discussing Coppola or Scarlett they likely meant Francis Ford or O’Hara, come December, chances are they’d be referring to Sofia or Johansson.

Lost In Translation is a film both timeless and deeply of its time. A vignette on loneliness and the craving for genuine connection, it was released just two months after the launch of MySpace in August 2003, arguably the gateway to this newfangled thing, ‘social media’. You’ll see no smartphones on the bar at the Park Hyatt, Tokyo this is a film whose characters communicate largely face-to-face, and if not, via the media of calls, faxes and notes under the door. It’s fair to say that on paper not a great deal occurs if it were to be released today you can imagine somebody tweeting, “IT’S SO BORING NOTHING HAPPENS” and yet what does transpire is, if you are of a romantic or exisistential bent, nothing short of momentous.

Tracing the burgeoning relationship between two lost the word comes up several times, not just in the title individuals (and it’s noteworthy that they don’t speak to each other until 32 minutes into the film, a third of the way through), this is a film as much about rediscovering yourself as meeting your soulmate.

Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) and Bob (Bill Murray) are looking at life from opposite perspectives he’s a married movie star past his prime, she’s a young woman drifting as she tries to figure out how to do life but united in their sense of emotional anaesthesia. “I didn’t feel anything,” weeps Charlotte to unmoved friend Lauren after watching monks chant at a shrine. Both staying in the Tokyo Hyatt for a week he to make commercials for Suntory Whisky, she accompanying her photographer husband while he’s on a shoot their relationship unfolds delicately, from a smile in the lift, to crazy nights out in the hectic playground of downtown Tokyo, to a miserable lunch where, having had an almighty bust-up, the strength of their awakened feelings becomes inescapably clear.

Sofia Coppola making only her second film, after The Virgin Suicides explores the beautiful mystery of human love and communion in a fever dream of neon lights and woozy visuals, set to an ethereal pop music score from the likes of Air and Phoenix, and it’s utterly beguiling. And then, of course, there is that final scene, when Bob jumps from his airportbound taxi, follows Charlotte down the street, turns her tear-strewn face to his and whispers in her ear. “WHAT DID HE SAY TO HER?” the Twitterverse would fret. Well, so we did in 2003 as well, but to no avail. As Bill Murray said himself when asked: “It’s between lovers.” Private. Not for public consumption. Imagine that in 2019. Coppola would go on to hone her elegant skills with the punk party of Marie Antoinette and near-wordless reverie of Somewhere Johansson would become one of Hollywood’s A-list, not to mention Black Widow. Murray would happily just carry on being Murray. And this small indie mood-piece will arguably remain the brightest moment in each of their storied careers.

LIZ BEARDSWORTH

EDGAR WRIGHT AND Simon

Pegg’s romzomcom is that rarest of things: a universally beloved British horror comedy. Perhaps it connected because of its whip-smarts and its whip-pans. Or its emphasis on character work amidst the gore. Or maybe because it’s really, really funny. Either way, it launched Wright and Pegg’s movie careers, and established the former as a significant new directorial voice. But it wasn’t always thus. As Wright explains, it took a while for the first flavour of the Cornetto Trilogy to be hailed as a classic.

Coming off their sitcom Spaced, Wright and Pegg struggled with scepticism, and a low budget.

“People would be dismissive of us to our faces. I remember vividly being in the reception at Pathé, and the receptionist said, I kid you not, ‘Wow, they’ll give anyone a movie these days.’ Working Title were the ones who gave us a chance, but a couple of times we ran out of time and money. It was a tough shoot for me. I had put so much pressure on myself to make something good. We didn’t really have the climax we wanted, so Eric Fellner said, ‘If you had an extra day or two, what would you do?’ So I came up with a plan, to amp up the ending, and have more mayhem and more zombies being killed. That was a real lucky break.”

Above: Umbellas and hockey sticks: fighting off zombies since 2004. Right: Things were turning nasty in the Tesco Black Friday sale.

Backed by Universal, Shaun Of The Dead was heavily marketed, well-reviewed, and slowly found an audience.

“The opening night, a few of us went to see it at Camden Parkway. We were sitting at the back, watching people laugh. On the Sunday I went to see it with my brother. There were maybe only 20 people there. It was the last time I went to see one of my films in general release. It did well at the UK box office, but it wasn’t a smash, like maybe Hot Fuzz was. It was a slow burn to success. Once the DVD came out, it really seemed to snowball. We spent all of that summer promoting it in the States, with Simon and Nick, which was amazing. Would a weird film like Shaun Of The Dead get a release now in the States, like it did in 2004? I don’t know. It’s a different landscape.”

Fifteen years on, Shaun Of The Dead is the dictionary definition of a cult classic, even inspiring Hallowe’en costumes.

“It was a life-changing movie for me. I think one of the reasons it became a perennial is it’s always on ITV and ITV2. But the thing about films that get repeated late at night is, if they don’t rate, they don’t get repeated. So people must keep watching it. One of the nicest things that can happen is when somebody quotes lines to you, or you hear a line used in a different context. That happens a lot with Shaun Of The Dead. And as somebody who read Empire from the start, it makes me feel very proud to be part of this.”

CHRIS HEWITT

IT FEELS STRANGE now that, back when Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal were cast as cowboys in Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain, people thought playing characters in a same-sex relationship would permanently knock their careers out of shape. It was risky, kissing another man on screen when, people seemed to argue, there were plenty of parts going that required you to snog a woman.

Fast-forward 14 years and straight actors are more than happy to play LGBT roles from Rami Malek to Timothée Chalamet via Cate Blanchett — so much so that a higher degree of devotion to understanding queer themes is now expected of anyone signing up to such a project. Wherever you stand on the issue, it’s clear we’ve come a long way.

In Brokeback Mountain, adapted from a New Yorker story by Annie Proulx, cowboys Ennis del Mar (Ledger) and Jack Twist (Gyllenhaal) are hired to tend to the flocks atop Brokeback Mountain one summer, where they quickly begin a relationship unlike any other. But life back on the ground is unlike life on that undisturbed vista, and soon they must return to society, abandoning their simpler, more rural way of life for something altogether more pragmatic and tempered.

Both men marry and become fathers, but are soon back in each other’s orbit. Down from the blissful mountain, where society has seemingly unwritten rules about what emotions men are allowed, both cowboys find the weight of the armour they must wear exhausting. The love that came so naturally that neither had to even speak it into existence suddenly sits on the surface of their lives, like oil on water.

Elements of Brokeback, such as the societal rejection of homosexuality, have begun to feel dated. Contrast with Francis Lee’s agriculturally adjacent God’s Own Country, where the two men identify as gay even if they don’t wear it on their sleeves. The threat of being outed, or even being discovered, has perished; Josh O’Connor’s Johnny Saxby is plagued by more modern problems. And in Call Me By Your Name, in the vague idyll of ‘somewhere in

Northern Italy’, liberal values extinguish any potential anxiety about a same-sex summer romance.

But, at the time, Brokeback’s mainstream success notably in suburban areas such as Portland, Houston, Dallas and Denver was a powerful indicator that LGBT stories had a broader place in pop culture outside of New York and Los Angeles. It may have lost Best Picture to Crash at the 2006 Oscars, causing Proulx to lament that, “We should have known conservative heffalump Academy voters would have rather different ideas of what was stirring contemporary culture.” Its legacy, though, has outlived the fraught zugzwang of awards circuits, whereby every decision seems to be a controversial one.

The story of Ennis and Jack is largely one of wasted potential and an elegy to lives not lived. That alone could be Brokeback’s ultimate legacy; it came at a time when the reality of being out and gay was inherently tragic and that tragedy was an important, necessary thing to communicate to audiences. The stories it has helped spearhead are vast, from the mainstream (Moonlight, Can You Ever Forgive Me?) to the lesser-known (Spa Night, Beach Rats), all with one shared goal: to continue Brokeback’s examination of sexuality, to ask difficult questions about the emotional well-being of men. Long may it continue.

CHRIS MANDLE

AS GUILLERMO DEL TORO stood on the stage of the Dolby Theatre in February 2018, holding his Best Picture Oscar aloft for The Shape Of Water, it’s important to remember that this wasn’t his first awards rodeo. Eleven years prior, he had already shattered the glass ceiling of fantasy films and rode roughshod over the notion that the Academy has disdain for genre pics when Pan’s Labyrinth won three Oscars, including a nomination for Best Foreign Language Film. Not bad for a deeply personal Spanishlanguage film featuring fairies, fauns and fascists. Here, Doug Jones, del Toro’s long-time friend and collaborator, who played two roles in the film the Faun and the chilling Pale Man reflects on del Toro’s masterpiece.

“The convention fan circuit is quite a big phenomenon now for us. And I can tell what sticks with people by what pictures are flying off my table. The Faun and The Pale Man are among the most popular still. If I had one movie pla y funeral which woul a long funeral I wou to be Pan’s Labyrinth the film that I think m an actor make sense.

“Who of us did a vivid imagination a I think Guillermo’s co to children in his mov something we all rela is this girl, little Ofelia an imagination that s d make it uld want it h That was made being .” d not have s children? nnection vies is ate to. Here a, who has she’s told who were enco our imaginatio who become G Toros, and go o Oscars in their “ ink we can all But those of us ouraged to use ons are the ones Guillermo del on to hold r hands one day.”

Right: Jones’ main role as underworld gate-keeper The Faun. Below: Ivana Baquero as Ofelia, the little girl with the big imagination. not to use. I th relate to that.

‘If you want a fi good and chea two of those.’ G with all three.

“There’s a saying: film done fast, ap, you can have Guillermo did it He’s just my favourite director ever. He’s such a people person. He knows psychology better than most therapists, so he knows how to direct each actor differently.”

“When you’re doing two [characters] in the same movie, you don’t want people to be like, ‘Isn’t that Marsha in a different wig?’ At first, I thought Guillermo was just being a cheap-ass, wanting [me to play] two roles for the price of one. But The Pale Man is a creation of The Faun, so Guillermo wanted a body type that you could recognise between the two of them.”

“My real legs were wrapped in green-screen material, with bony, emaciated little pony legs attached to my real legs that I negotiated myself. I thought, ‘He barely has the power to walk because he’s been atrophying for so long since his last meal.’ All they had to do in post-production was wipe away my real legs.”

“There are little nuances you can’t define. He had to age backwards, he’s got auburn hair, clear eyes and ears, and he’s very smooth by the end. He’s the portal-keeper for the underworld, which is a very high-pay assignment from the king of the underworld. I felt very regal.”

“As the only American in the cast, my biggest fear was getting the Spanish dialogue correct, and letting it flow out of me. But it helped reduce stresses — people were talking Spanish around me all day, and if I heard English I knew it was directed towards me. I could let every other conversation go.”

CHRIS HEWITT

THE COEN BROTHERS and Cormac McCarthy are not an obviously heavenly match. The directors, even at their most serious, are poets of absurdity, while humour is about the last thing you associate with the black-souled characters of McCarthy’s gorgeous, violent novels. But look closer and there are common threads between the two works. Both McCarthy and the Coens delve into the tragic ironies of human existence and the universe’s lack of concern for our little plans, so perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that the match turned McCarthy’s book into a Best Picture Oscar-winner and fuelled a trend for warped, reimagined Westerns.

We know what to expect from this story, or we think we do. Josh Brolin’s resourceful, basically decent Llewelyn Moss is clearly our hero, so he’s probably going to get away with the money he lifted from a dead gangster. Tommy Lee Jones’ level-headed, experienced small-town sheriff Ed Tom Bell will surely figure out the mess of bodies in the desert and bring the bad guys to justice. And Javier Bardem’s psychotic fixer Anton Chigurh will not prosper. That’s how these things work. Except that they don’t. That’s the point, of course. All the signs wrong-foot us, as the Coens play out the genre conventions of the Western and the thriller, only to subvert each in turn. Jones’ laconic narration bookends the film and his anecdotes pepper it: he’s even become a meme, the endlessly unimpressed authority figure peering at you from over his newspaper. Brolin has rarely been as charismatic, or as desperate and cruelly, he might have gotten away with it but for the impulse to do a small kindness for a dying man.

But it’s Bardem who steals the show. Almost Chigurh’s first act is to strangle a sheriff’s deputy to death despite his handcuffs: the killer’s eyes bug out ecstatically and he wears a demonic grin. From there, he gets worse: his confrontation with a convenience store owner who offends him by asking about the weather is bonechilling. That coin toss may not go Chigurh’s way, but there’s a sense that he might yet lash out despite his own rules, an edge of unpredictability as disturbing as his haircut.

Admittedly, the store owner’s question was a silly one. The weather must have been dry, and hot, because vast, empty desert landscapes shape the film. With nowhere for Moss to hide, only to run, life out there looks impossible. And, ultimately, it is for Moss, killed ignobly and off-screen by a stranger, and for his wife, and for almost everyone that Chirgurh meets.

But that violence is only half the story. What the Coens found in the novel is that there is absurdity everywhere. It’s in Moss’ stoic underreactions (“Yup,” he grunts when he finds that suitcase full of cash) and Chigurh’s elaborate code of honour. And there’s the same dark fatalism that underpins

Blood Simple or A Serious Man underneath, the idea that man’s best-laid plans fall apart in this capricious universe. This may be a comedy that’s desert-dry and black as night, but you have to laugh.

HELEN O’HARA

On 24 August, 2007, Empire’s Dan Jolin met Heath Ledger on the Chicago set of Christopher Nolan’s second Batman film. Less than five months before Ledger’s tragic death by accidental overdose of prescription drugs, it was the first time he’d ever talked about playing the Joker.

LEDGER WAS IN civvies, a battered grey trilby pulled low over his head. He’d never seemed comfortable talking to the press, and that day he seemed more nervous than usual. Understandable: he’d never taken a role in such a big movie before, let alone one so tightly shrouded in secrecy.

At the time I suspected we’d see something very different from Ledger’s Joker — this was Nolan’s ‘play it for real and make it for grownups’ take on Gotham, after all. But nobody outside of the production had any idea of just how spine-tinglingly chilling and entertaining his take would be. Although perhaps we should have known, after the tantalising clues he left during our chat...

Everyone say fearless to ta role. Is that t I definitely fea that scares m me at the sam know if I was f I certainly had es during ys you’re ake on this true? ared it. Anything e, I guess, excites me time. I don’t fearless, but d to put

Top to bottom: Joker (Heath Ledger) appears with his gang; His bedside manner left a lot to be desired; Ledger, of playing the Joker: “We all have evil in us.” on a brave face and believe that I have something up my sleeve. Something that was different. differen Did you rew Batman? Not after I g I’ve seen it m I’m a huge f seen Chris’ film I knew t a difference Nolan watch Tim Burton’s got the role, but many times before. fan, but having first [Batman] there there was e between a Chris n film and a Tim visuals like that. I guess the rest is just trusting your research and trusting all the definitions of a psychopath. And then just running with it. I don’t know. I’m trying not to give it too much thought at this point.

What did you think the first time you saw yourself as the Joker?

I haven’t looked at it yet. I heard it in the [first] trailer and it kind of freaked me out a little bit.

Are you having fun playing him?

Burton film. Therefore there was enough room for a fresh portrayal. So I steered away from what Jack [Nicholson] did. Hopefully.

How do you find the evil within this character?

I don’t know. I think we all have it in us. Sometimes I’ll connect some scary thoughts. It’s kind of like eating raw meat, what that does to your mouth and your eyes, and simple little

Yeah, it’s the most fun I’ve had playing a role. I’m really surprised Chris knew I could do it, or thought I had something in me like this. I don’t know how he came to cast me to do it. But yeah, it’s the bomb. It’s definitely the most fun I’ve had, the most freedom I’ve had, and the work schedule is great. I work two days and have three weeks off! It’s been like that for six months.

Does your Joker have any cool gimmicks?

No, not a lot of gimmicks. He’s just bloody.

So the film’s gory, then?

I mean, it’s a PG-13, isn’t it? But I wanted to present kind of an X-rated performance, if I could. That’s what I’ve been going for.

HAVING

Already Spent

$100 million on Avatar, James Cameron was three years into the four-and-a-halfyear production before he saw a completed shot that gave him any confidence it would work. The first trailer didn’t give the public much confidence either, treated with about as much positivity as the recent Cats unveiling. People mentioned FernGully They mentioned the Smurfs. How goofy it all looked. What a joke this would be. Right?

Titanic had consumed Cameron. For years after he explored the deep. When he finally emerged, he set to work on something that seemed even more ambitious than the biggest film of all time. This was unprecedented world-building, in which we would all virtually visit a 22nd century jungle moon. He would pioneer the medium to get there.

Cameron wanted the experience of watching Avatar to be like dreaming with our eyes open and, via nextlevel performance-capture techniques, it was. The movie, certainly in 3D, and even more so in IMAX, was utterly transportative, like a real-life Total Recall we were on Pandora. We were there. There really had been nothing like this before, a palpable, enveloping thrill-ride that accounted for all those repeat viewings.

Yet these were no hollow gimmicks the technology was there to service the action. For all of Avatar’s innovation, this was tried-and-tested storytelling, Cameron drawing from Rudyard Kipling and Edgar Rice Burroughs as much as he was from America’s involvement in the Iraq War. Underneath the civilisation he invented, behind the new Na’vi language he co-created (with USC linguist Dr Paul Frommer), this was a simple tale of human folly, of oppression, of war. “It’s at a system level that we totally fall apart act like complete monkeys,” he told Empire. Avatar made $1 billion in 19 days, eventually resting at $2.79 billion, comfortably toppling Titanic Once again, Cameron had beaten the odds and made the biggest film of all time and it would remain so until mere months ago, when Disney pulled out all the stops to conquer it with Avengers: Endgame Regrettably, because of its behemoth box office,

Avatar kickstarted a 3D trend that has only recently subsided. For a decade, studios subjected us to mostly lesser 3D experiences, sometimes cheaply, almost always distractingly. None of them none have come close to what Cameron achieved with Avatar

The film itself has cooled somewhat, its delights dampened on smaller screens. Still, Avatar cemented Cameron’s reputation as some sort of sorcerer, unable to direct something that isn’t a phenomenon. This was event cinema, redefining the form. And it had such an effect on Cameron that he devoted the remainder of his life, so far, to it. Whereas once Titanic consumed him, now it was Avatar’s turn.

Whether or not such success, or cultural impact, or even mere entertainment value can be repeated again and again, and again, and again is anyone’s guess. But it would be foolish to doubt him.

ALEX GODFREY

WHEN VISUAL-EFFECTS

supervisor Paul Franklin first read the script for Inception (in a locked, guarded room in LA, late February 2009), he couldn’t wrap his head around it. “I was left reeling,” he admits. He was expecting it to be another modest, relatively low-budget film, like 2006’s The Prestige. Then Christopher Nolan revealed there would be 800 VFX shots more than in either of his Batman movies to date. “I thought, ‘Ooh, what have I gotten myself into?’” Franklin says. “It was an extraordinary confluence of all different types of filmmaking, with a genius director given full rein to do whatever he wanted.”

As these four gobsmacking set-pieces prove…

When Ariadne (Ellen Page) realises she and Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) aren’t in a Parisian café but a constructed dreamworld, her anxiety causes that world to spectacularly destroy itself around them. The inspiration was Zabriskie Point’s super-slo-mo explosion which Nolan wanted to pull off using minimal CGI. “The challenge was, how do you set off explosions in a Parisian street without destroying the street?” says Franklin. “So special-effects supervisor Chris Corbould came up with this fantastic series of air mortars that were packed full of soft, lightweight debris: flowers, croissants, things like that. Then we added the more dangerous stuff: crockery, bottles, large pieces of furniture. Although the car was real. We just digitally painted out the cable pulling it.”

Tasked with showing the streets of Paris folding impossibly over each other, Franklin recalled watching all the bridges on Chicago River being raised during the shoot of Batman Begins “It looked like the whole world was folding on a hinge, because the road markings, the sidewalks, the street lamps all go with the bridges. So I suggested to Chris the idea of a series of linked bridge segments.” One of Franklin’s artists, Alison Wortman, produced a “little test” of how it might work. The moment Nolan saw it, he told Franklin, “That’s the shot. We’re putting that in the movie.”

Clockwise from main: That immense moment when Paris starts to fold; The perfect recreation of the drunkest you’ve ever been; Nicola Hoyle’s crumbling coast-city; Croissants and flowers form a slo-mo explosion.

On first reading the script, Franklin figured Arthur’s (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) twisting corridor tumble-scrap would at least require digital doubles and extensions. But... “Chris Nolan was absolutely adamant that he wanted to get this for real. And Chris Corbould and his team absolutely rose to the challenge.” Corbould built the 100 foot-long, rotating corridor in a soundstage in Cardington Studios, so there is, Franklin confirms, only one shot which required visual effects: when Arthur falls into the hotel room, grabs the gun and shoots his foe.

The surreal vista of this crumbling coastal dream-city was tough to nail, with all the concept art looking “like things you’d seen before,” Franklin says. So he suggested a different approach. “We built a digital model of a glacier, and visual-effects artist Nicola Hoyle wrote a piece of software which analysed its internal volume and filled it with architectural blocks. We ended up with this very complex organic city. Nobody other than Chris would have been able to go to the studio and say, ‘The VFX guys are trying this cool idea. It’s going to cost a lot. You won’t see anything for six months. You have to trust them.’ That wouldn’t have happened with another filmmaker.”

DAN JOLIN

BRIDESMAIDS LANDED LIKE an oestrogen-studded bomb in 2011, blowing apart almost every single assumption about female-fronted comedies. That they were too big a risk. That they wouldn’t make any money. That men wouldn’t buy a ticket (because, ewww, women making jokes). That women would be too busy buying a ticket to the latest romcom, (with the emphasis firmly on rom). Because, you see: women didn’t want to watch funny women; men certainly didn’t want to watch funny women, so what sense would it make to produce a film that relied on both these maxims being dead wrong?

It’s fair to say that cinema oftentimes likes its comfort zone. But Bridesmaids challenged the softness under its arse — even if it did so in the Trojan horse of a ‘wedding movie’. The wedding, as it turned out, was the least important bit of the story, co-written by Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo. Annie (Wiig) is doing a job she hates (and which she is terrible at, spectacularly calling one teenage customer “a little cunt”), living in a weird flatshare and attempting a relationship with a fuck-buddy (Jon Hamm) who is all fuck and no buddy. All of which is brought into sharp focus when her best friend Lillian (Maya Rudolph) gets engaged.

But it was her fiancé Doug who was arguably the one drawn like a cold bowl of porridge. He got just one line — remember it? Us neither — and one awkward dancing-withan-overbite scene. For this is the story of women; of a beautifully broad and freaky group of women in the bride and bridesmaids of the title, played by Ellie Kemper, Rose Byrne, Wendi McLendonCovey and, of course, Melissa McCarthy.

It was about women’s friendships and haterelationships, in all of their beauty, spite, romance and ugliness. It was honest, dirty, sweary, sweet and out-and-out rank in places. It portrayed women not as fragile objects of purity and grace, but shitting-in-the-street, vomiting-in-the-sink but still full-hearted human beings. It didn’t drag out the usual cinematic tropes of women who are meant to make you laugh — sardonic and cynical (read: bitter) or full-on raging nuts. But, perhaps most significantly of all, it simply allowed them to be funny. Or rather, provided a platform for them to be funny — there was no “allowing” involved. The message for anyone walking out the screening as Wilson Phillips closed down proceedings was loud and clear: Women. Are. Funny. Too. In the months that followed (after it opened to a $26 million weekend), a landscape that hadn’t been visible before appeared in front of our very eyes as, in the slipstream of Bridesmaids, studios scrambled to have their own female-fronted comedy hits. Let’s be clear: not all were successful, but it’s undoubtedly made women’s comedies easier to get financed, greenlit and made. For women to be trusted to write women’s stories in a frank and fucked-up way. Women of Bridesmaids, we’d go for questionable Brazilian meat with you any day.

TERRI WHITE

IN 2012, THERE was an idea. An idea to bring together a group of remarkable people, to see if they could create something more than just a regular sequel. To see if multiple superheroes could work together without making one almighty mess. It was the The Avengers Initiative, and it changed the game for good. Here’s how.

Marvel Studios had already risked frontloading its less well-known (Iron Man) and goofier (Thor, Captain America) characters through Phase 1, but that was nothing compared to the risk of bringing them all together — to have Tony Stark rubbing shoulders with a literal Norse god, while fighting hordes of space aliens. But thanks to a sharp script from geek god Joss Whedon — who knew a thing or two about ensemble casts from his Buffy and Firefly days — it worked. Partly it trusted in the comics — if Hulk and Cap and Black Widow could co-exist on the page, why should the big screen be any different?

Whedon’s screenplay did exactly what the UK title promised: it assembled the Avengers, prioritising the group over every individual hero. Sure, Hawkeye drew the short straw on screen-time and character development but everyone got their moment to shine when the action hit. Speaking of which…

Above: The Big Six — Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), Thor (Chris Hemsworth), Captain America (Chris Evans), Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner), Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr) and Hulk (Mark Ruffalo). Right: Assembler Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson).

Below: Loki (Tom Hiddleston), in search of the Tesseract.

Blockbusters are worthless if they don’t bust those blocks real good — and the final hour of The Avengers delivered next-level action spectacle beyond a comicbook fan’s wildest dreams.

The Chitauri army is a largely faceless enemy, but allows the Avengers themselves to take centre stage in the Battle Of New York Cap and Thor fighting back to back, Iron Man flying into the jaws of a Leviathan, Hawkeye firing an arrow over his shoulder, Black Widow hijacking a Chitauri speeder, Hulk smashing. The threat was bigger, the action constantly flowing, punctuated throughout with zingy gags and storytelling beats. And it was fun — with high stakes, yes, but a wit and levity that remains Marvel’s signature tone. If it feels smaller now than it did in 2012, it’s only because Endgame is so much bigger but hey, it doesn’t get any bigger than the biggest film of all time.

For better or worse, The Avengers showed Hollywood execs that audiences were ready for ‘universe’ storytelling, beyond the traditional sequel model, with the mid-credits stinger introducing the dreaded Thanos. Individually, the likes of Iron Man, Thor, and Captain America: The First Avenger fared well, but together they were box-office dynamite, making $1.5 billion worldwide. It didn’t take long for other studios to follow suit in establishing their own universe franchises — though what proved harder was doing it right. DC and Warner Bros. gave us the hastily instigated super-squabble of Batman v Superman followed by a limp Justice League, before scaling back down to focus on more satisfying individual hero stories again. And then there was the proposed ‘Dark Universe’ for the Universal Monsters, which amounted solely to a starry cast photo. Marvel Studios made the Avengers Initiative succeed by following one simple rule: assemble with care. BEN TRAVIS

IT’S THE FILM that puts the ‘pace’ into ‘space’. Ten minutes into the 91-minute runtime of Gravity, debris travelling faster than a speeding bullet hits the Space Shuttle Explorer, and our heroes, Dr Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) and Lt Matt Kowalski (George Clooney), are almost immediately in the gravest peril. Latecomers will not be admitted.

Things hardly slow down after that, director Alfonso Cuarón barely stopping for whatever breath is left in the astronauts’ fast-fading oxygen tanks. That opening sequence runs an astonishing 17 minutes without cutting, and in fact, the entire film has just 156 shots, far fewer than most conventional films. Cuarón loves a long, uninterrupted take his filmography, from Children Of Men to Roma, is full of them and watching Gravity is like bearing witness to an immersive, incredibly stressful live stage show in space. Seen on the big screen, it was that special thing: a proper cinematic experience Part of the joy of it is that it feels so authentic: the attention to scientific realism may be unparallelled. Although the film’s inciting incident the long-theorised Kessler Syndrome, in which space-junk causes a catastrophic chain reaction in near-Earth orbit has not yet actually happened, everything is based on insanely meticulous research, every space-nook and space-cranny accurate to NASA’s exacting standards.

Ask any passing astronaut and they’ll agree. NASA’s Mike Massimino, who, like Bullock’s character, spent some intimate time with the Hubble telescope, marvelled that the film featured a one-of-a-kind wirecutter, identical to the one he used in real life the kind of detail only an astronaut would notice.

All of this is surface detail, a nerdish rigour that cemented the important part: characters to care about. Yes, there’s George Clooney at his most movie-star charming (“You never realised how devastatingly good-looking I am,” he purrs during an especially tense moment) but it’s Bullock who is the film’s core, her vulnerability giving the journey pathos and immense stakes. It is, as much as anything, a film about motherhood and grief, not usually themes considered when you’re blowing up space stations. Gravity is the rare blockbuster to give a female character centre-stage and make her fully realised, rather than just ‘one of the boys’.

Out of this world: Sandra Bullock is centre-stage as Dr Ryan Stone.

For all the complicated effects and uncomfortable working conditions (Bullock spent up to 10 hours a day hanging in a mechanical rig while robotic-controlled cameras moved around her), Gravity is a very simple story, told efficiently and brilliantly. It doesn’t waste a second. It’s unlike any sci-fi you can think of. In fact, it’s not even science-fiction at all Cuarón simply won’t have it. “It’s science-fact,” he told Empire insistently in 2013. So what is it, then? A space film?

A disaster movie? A thriller?

A horror? A melodrama? A comedy of errors? The answer is all of these things, and more. Really, there had never been anything quite like Gravity, and in the years after 2013, there hasn’t really been anything since. As Kowalski says at one point: “Gotta admit one thing can’t beat the view.”

JOHN NUGENT

THE FIRST BEST Picture winner to win with a parenthesis in its title, Alexander G. Iñárritu’s Birdman Or (The Unexpected Virtue Of Ignorance) is perhaps the magic trick of Empire’s lifetime. The 119-minute movie about fading movie star Riggan Thomson (Michael Keaton), who attempts to reclaim his fame (and himself) by mounting a Raymond Carver play on Broadway is constructed to look like one seamless shot, even though the action takes place over three days and numerous locales. Here’s how invisible tricks delivered Iñárritu’s virtuoso vision...

As befits a film about ego run rampant, mirrors abound in Birdman To free up the camera, a lot of effort went into removing the crew’s reflections digitally. A 2.5D digital matte painting of the reflected environment was created replacing everything around Michael Keaton in the foreground. The smudges and dirt on the mirror footage were then cut and pasted onto the digital mirror.

Kaufman Astoria Studios in New York the corridors on the set were made wider than normal to accommodate Steadicam operator Chris Haarhoff (note The Shiningesque carpet, another film about a man in meltdown).

DP Emmanuel ‘Chivo’

Much of Birdman’s action takes place in the wings at the St James Theatre, recreated at

Lubezki had a crew of eight grips moving lights and diffusers as the actors and camera moved through the scene. The result resembled an avant-garde ballet.

The fluidity of Birdman is created in long takes stitched together to create one flowing movement, hidden by cheeky edits often obscured in darkness or by motion blurs during fast pans. The actors were asked to deliver up to 15 pages of dialogue in oners often running up to 10 minutes. According to a running tally kept by the cast, Emma Stone fluffed the most takes, Zach Galifianakis the fewest.

Clockwise from main: Michael Keaton’s actor Riggan, stalked by the memory of his former superhero role; Naked (ish) in Times Square; Magically coming into land; Confronting volatile co-star Mike (Edward Norton); With best friend and lawyer Jake (Zach Galifianakis); The mesmerising mirror shot from Riggan’s dressing room.

The moment Riggan runs out into Times Square dressed in his underpants is the antithesis of the film’s hyper-rehearsed MO. Iñárritu wanted Times Square to be packed, so shot the sequence at the busiest time on a Friday night. Sixty extras surrounded Keaton and a marching band was hired to distract the public. The shot was captured without a hitch in just two takes a crazed guy in his briefs is no biggie in New York.

Just as it is about the battle between theatre and film, Birdman mixes bleeding-edge digital VFX and old-school stage craft. Just after Riggan flies through the air in a bravura CG assisted sequence, when he comes down to land, Keaton is being lowered onto the street by a crane. As he lands, a passerby surreptitiously moves behind Keaton and unhooks him from the wire, letting the actor walk into the scene. Pure sleight-ofhand. Pure Birdman IAN FREER

ASK ANY ACTION director worth their salt — your Edgar Wrights, your Gareth Evans, your Chris McQuarries — about George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road, and chances are a strange, beatific smile will cross their face. A single tear may even roll down their cheeks. For them, and for us, Mad Max: Fury Road is the movie that raised the bar on action filmmaking. And it’s all down to the genius of a quiet, septuagenarian Australian doctor who had spent the last couple of decades making movies about dancing penguins, talking pigs — anything but rollicking, high-octane, desert-set chase movies. But when he came back to action, Miller knew exactly what he was aiming for. “I wanted to do virtually a silent movie with sound and music,” he says. “And on a technical level

I thought, ‘My God, we can do stuff. You can do something much more spectacular, much more safely.’” Here, he exclusively shares some tips from his action rulebook.

Miller, and his DP John Seale, devised a visual style which would centre the action in the frame of each shot, meaning that the viewer’s eye always remains focused on what’s important. “It’s visual music,” he says. “In order to read it with the eye so it’s not dissonant, all the visual passages have to flow. Eye-scan is hugely important. A lot of filmmaking in action was basically refreshing the frame second or two second regardless of any cau between one shot an other. What we were about in Fury Road w there had to be a stro connection between which handily allowed useful developments in technology.

Above: Typically understated, Tom Hardy as Max in the project Miller describes as “a silent movie with sound and music”. Left: Stunt action that’s a long way from dancing penguins. Below: Charlize Theron as the formidable war captain Furiosa.

“For the polecats in the final chase, initially I thought it would be way too risky to put someone on top of a pole on a moving vehicle, so my thought was to comp in those guys swinging back and forth,” says Miller. “But by the time we moved to Africa, the stunt riggers had figured out a way to make it actual by having the pendulum effect. It was very, very safe.”

The film suffered major delays in starting production, m from Australia to Nam y every ds, usality d the clear as that ong shots.” moving mibia,

There i it’s mai enhanc from ac from th part, w trucks aro sp Mi a bi logis very destr Rig w s CGI in Fury Road. But nly there to augment, to ce, to remove harnesses ctors or track marks he sand. For the most hen you see cars and and bikes weaving ound each other at high eeds, that’s exactly what ller shot. “Every day was g stunt day. Just the stics of that alone were tough.” The spectacular uction of Furiosa’s War was, astonishingly, done

ALAMY

for real. “We looked at doing it with scale models, and doing it as a pure CG shot. I was then persuaded that in a movie in which everything else had been done in a real world, to have that vehicle do that stunt as CG was too big of a cheat.”

One of the film’s six Oscars went to Miller’s editor, Margaret Sixel, for her work in making sense of all the madness. “I don’t think anybody could imagine what a Rubik’s Cube of a movie it was for someone to cut. To be able to see the whole at the same time that you’re digging down into the granular is an exceptional sort of mindset. I’m usually good at that stuff, but she eclipsed me.” Fury Road may feel like a classical action movie, devoid of the modern trend of shakycam, but it’s cut faster than any of the previous Mad Max movies. “I realised that we as audiences are speed-reading films now, compared to 30, 40 years ago.”

CHRIS HEWITT

“CAREER SUICIDE” IS a phrase

Barry Jenkins heard a lot during the eight-year struggle to get Moonlight made.

“We are going to follow a young black boy struggling with his sexuality and his mom is addicted to crack cocaine,” Jenkins told Empire in 2018 about the pitch. “We’re going to cast three actors to play him and the last actor looks nothing like the other two.”

The finished film not only gifted Jenkins the most famous Best Picture win in Oscar history, but became a cinematic rarity. Brokeback Mountain had tackled homosexuality and masculinity, while Crash highlighted the hardships of growing up black in America. Moonlight, though, is the only Best Picture to hang a lantern on black/queer intersectionality and do so in such delicate, nuanced ways. It also consigned the hashtag #OscarsSoWhite to the dustbin.

The film has its roots in Jenkins’ attempts to write a film about his personal connection to his mother. Two years later he was introduced to Tarell Alvin McCraney’s semi-autobiographical play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue and discovered “a cosmic synchronicity between our two personalities and our two lives” which opened up a rich vein of creativity.

“On discovering Tarell’s play, I thought, ‘Oh, this is great. It’s about him, not me. I can kind of address some of these personal things without making it personal,’” he says. “But I think every film a director makes is personal on some level. It became way more personal than I ever wanted it to be.”

Both men grew up in Miami. Both had complex relationships with drug-addicted mothers. Like Moonlight’s protagonist Chiron, Jenkins withdrew into himself to avoid being pulled into a world of crime. But unlike McCraney and Chiron, Jenkins isn’t gay. While the director had reservations about accurately representing Chiron’s sexuality, he so strongly identified with every other aspect of the character, he felt “it would be cowardly to turn my back on him for that. Once I got past that, I was neither a straight man or a gay man. I was the man telling the story.”

For all the film’s huge success both cinematically and culturally, there are things Jenkins would do differently now particularly the first time we meet Naomie Harris as Chiron’s mother. “I think it was the first day of working with Naomie,” he recalls. “I think that’s one of the rare times where the visual director in me took a back seat because my main objective was to get to know Naomie.” Yet overall, Moonlight poured sunshine on Jenkins’ own self-belief as a filmmaker.

“I doubt myself all the time,” he says. “I still doubt myself now. So this is not to do with the Academy Awards, this is to do with the actual film as it exists it was confirmation for me that I could trust my aesthetic impulses, my creative impulses, and that what I had to say was worthwhile. It was extremely validating for me personally.”

And for an entire community around the world.

IAN FREER

IT SPEAKS TO the phenomenal staying power of Get Out — a rare horror movie that’s told from the black perspective — that its writer-director Jordan Peele picked up the Best Screenplay Oscar over a year after it first debuted in US cinemas. The Academy hadn’t been able to get the film out of their head, and neither, it turned out, could the rest of us. There are few films which have infiltrated the public consciousness quite like the story of Chris Washington (Daniel Kaluuya), a black photographer who discovers some terrifying secrets when he visits the parents of his white girlfriend. It didn’t take long for terms like ‘The Sunken Place’ to become part of the vernacular, or for jokes like, “I’ve watched Get Out three times” — a play on a memorable line involving Obama — to pervade the internet.

But it is a film worth revisiting time and time again, not only for its nail-chewing twists and turns but for its biting and layered examination of racial relations. Peele started writing the script in 2008 as a response to a rising sentiment that we were living in a post-racial era following Obama’s election, and Get Out’s February 2017 release — a month after Donald Trump’s inauguration — could not have been better-timed. There are multiple scenes that expose the racism of white liberals, and although their ultimate plan in the movie is as fantastical as it is disturbing, the real-life overtones are more frightening than any jump-scare. A closer look reveals that the film is studded with subtle symbolic details, such as the picking of cotton from a leather chair at a crucial moment.

Despite its deadly serious themes, Peele’s debut is consistently hilarious. That’s in large part due to the fact that much of the cathartic humour is rooted in its scares. There’s no better example of this than the film’s final moments, in which the flashing lights of a police car appear. It seems Chris is destined for the kind of bleak fate that has befallen many innocent AfricanAmericans (and indeed, he does wind up in prison in the film’s alternate ending), but instead the dark moment turns into one of Get Out’s funniest as his best friend Rod (Lil Rel Howery) bounces out of the car. Another reason to get Get Out on again and again is to spot the many nods to classic horror. Being the genre aficionado that he is, it’s no surprise that Peele lists The Stepford Wives, Rosemary’s Baby, Halloween, The Shining and many more as influences for the film. The astonishing thing is that, with his very first effort, Peele has made a classic that can sit comfortably alongside those on a shelf. And this was just the beginning — let’s see where he goes.

Empire went on set of Black Panther in Atlanta in 2017 for a cover story the following year. Producer Nate Moore had developed the story in the Marvel writers’ programme and was key in the film making it to screen. This excerpt from a second interview with him, just before Black Panther’s release, revealed the personal, cultural and cinematic significance of the film that would go on to gross a billion dollars in just 26 days.

Can you remember when you first encountered Black Panther?

It was as a kid. There was a Captain America cover with Captain America in the foreground, flanked by the Falcon and Black Panther. That was the first time I saw Black Panther and he was awesome. The character design was really unique. When I started getting into comics, one of the first runs of Panther I did read, which I still think is a super powerful, was Christopher Priest’s. He very smartly figured out the most interesting thing about Black Panther was that he was a king and a superhero, so he was constantly pulled between his duties to his nation and wanting to do the right thing.

And it’s the first mainstream black superhero from comics that has made it to the screen.

Yes, as the lead character, assuming that you don’t consider Blade a mainstream comic. And the first mainstream African hero. And I make that distinction because it’s something that we found very important in making the film — that T’Challa and Wakanda felt very African. Ryan [Coogler] especially was leading the charge and going the extra mile to get all the details of what that would mean, to be African in the film. And something that, by the way, Chadwick Boseman, even during Civil War, wanted character in modern Western cinema, where it’s not Blood Diamond or something where there’s a white character who’s your entry point into the film. I think seeing representation on that level is important. And important for a continent of people. Not that we can speak for a continent, but for them to be able to see themselves on screen, I think, is going to be really impactful. unique, pective that we don’t et to see in film that sense does like a significant nt for entation? to bring to it, from the way he spoke and the way he moved. Making sure there was African influence. Not because it’s not cool to be African-American, but just because again, that’s a detail that makes T’Challa super-unique and it’s a persp often g And in it feel l momen represe I think a film w African was the so. I can’t recall where a black n character e lead

Above: T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman) and Erik Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan) go head to head. Right: Bodyguards Ayo (Florence Kasumba) and Okoye (Danai Gurira). Below: T’Challa suited up as Black Panther.

Can you speak a little bit about Ryan Coogler?

Yeah, look, he’s a really special filmmaker and only 31 years old. The first time I learned about Ryan Coogler, I and another writer just happened to go to the movies one day after work and we went to see Fruitvale Station We were so hed by the eally have an ion. It was And so that’s even knew n Coogler. saw even the d, I remember oing, “We guy.” emotionally touch film we couldn’t re actual conversat that effective. A the first time I the name Ryan And when we s trailer for Cree Kevin [Feige] go should find this TERRI WHITE

MANSON, BTK, SON OF SAM... DAVID FINCHER’S MINDHUNTER IS BACK WITH A BLOODY PARADE OF SERIAL-KILLER ALL-STARS, AND BY DIALLING DOWN THE SENSATIONALISM IT’S MAKING THEM SCARIER THAN EVER

I WANT TO HAVE NO IDEA WHAT’S GOING ON IN YOUR HEAD.”

David Fincher is issuing instructions to a moustachioed man, who is gazing into a mirror, adjusting the shoulder strap on the woman’s slip he’s wearing. The crew, similarly delicately, adjust the lighting for this moment of self-fulfilment — one of a series of episodepuncturing vignettes of Dennis Rader (played by Sonny Valicenti), aka The BTK Killer. Bind. Torture. Kill. And do it quickly.

Fincher is on a tight schedule for these late additions to the lengthy shoot. While the scene is set, he sits at the monitor with lead writer Courtenay Miles, adjusting dialogue, as the art department present him with crime-scene photographs and mementos of victims for sign-off. Multitasking can be murder.

Camera set, they shoot. Once. Twice. “That is fucking creepozoid,” says Fincher, after the third take. If you can manage to unsettle the director of Seven and Zodiac, then you’re probably doing your job. The next few days filming in this cavernous Pittsburgh studio will involve FBI office politics, masks (literal and figurative) and autoerotic asphyxiation. As one crew member puts it, “Some things you can’t unsee.”

Back for its second season, Mindhunter has lost none of its fearlessness. BTK returns, of course, but following impactful portrayals of lesser-known serial killers Edmund Kemper and Jerry Brudos, this year is taking on the iconic — including arguably the two most famous serial killers of all: Charles Manson (Damon Herriman) and David Berkowitz, aka Son of Sam (Oliver Cooper). The latter we’ve previously seen on screen being commanded by a demonpossessed dog in Spike Lee’s Summer Of Sam And — on the 50th anniversary of the murders his ‘disciples’ carried out — Manson is everywhere, including in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time In Hollywood (portrayed by the same actor, Damon Herriman). But whereas most movies lean into the mythology of Manson, or embellish Berkowitz, Mindhunter is looking to re-examine reality. This isn’t hellhound hyperbole or gauze-softened myth. It’s the ugly truth.

“WE WANT TO BELIEVE THEY’RE MADMEN,”

says Courtenay Miles, “But when you read their history, their journals, letters, you see it is a human being in there. But it’s a human being gone wrong.” Miles was first assistant director on the debut series — the aide-de-camp to the director’s general — and made the unlikely but long-cherished transition to writer when Fincher gave her a shot. She immersed herself in the world of serial killers‚ and lost sleep as a result. “All of the characteristics that are in their mental structure and their compulsions are things that any other human being can identify with,” she says, reflecting on the long gestation of serial killers. “They’re made over 20 years. Nurturing these compulsions. That just got under my skin.”

Miles got the chance to be disturbed — and earn her first screenwriting credit — because Fincher cares considerably less about reputation than he does about his own lived experience. But while the first season saw him employ emerging directors (the most high-profile being Asif Kapadia, whose greatest achievements were in documentaries), here he’s joined behind the lens by two cinematic heavyweights. Carl Franklin is of late an in-demand director of TV, including House Of Cards, but was responsible for some astounding crime cinema in the 1990s: Devil In A Blue Dress and One False Move. In that grubby, merciless thriller, the wife of Bill Paxton’s seemingly guileless cop observes, “Dale doesn’t know any better. He watches TV. I read non-fiction.” Mindhunter bridges that divide. The other director is Andrew Dominik, whose three features all deal with the ruthless reality beneath criminal lore and legends (Chopper, The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward

Robert Ford, Killing Them Softly). Dominik has wrapped his two episodes. Franklin is shooting four, Fincher three — but, as Dominik puts it, “his tentacles are everywhere”.

Today, while Fincher films BTK, Franklin is on the neighbouring stage with series leads Jonathan Groff and Holt McCallany. As the FBI odd couple of ambitious idealist Holden Ford and reality-worn veteran Bill Tench, they’re wrestling with how to take what they’ve learned interviewing killers out into the field — specifically a live investigation of what became known as the Atlanta Child Murders (or ATKID). Between them is Albert Jones as Jim Barney, the AfricanAmerican agent who was denied the chance to join their Behavioural Science Unit in Season 1. He understands the implications of a case that doesn’t have the prominence it would if a string of white, middle-class children were being killed, rather than working-class African American ones. “That certainly was in the air,” says Jones. “These are black children that are going missing and being found dead. This notion that it wasn’t getting the immediacy and the attention it warranted lit a fire in Atlanta.”

As filming goes on, Fincher and Miles stand in the shadows between stages, whispering about pages they have just revised, trying to get the details just right. “Get it to Carl,” Fincher says. “Just go, ‘Look dude, this has been crunched together from 15 different versions — you need to make it so you buy it...’ You’ve got to let him know to make the vernacular work...”

Franklin will later say this process of continual revision isn’t that unusual on long-form storytelling, where a domino effect can be triggered by one adjustment. “They could be problems, they could be hidden gifts.” Still, in Franklin’s fourth month of his five-month stint, there’s definitely the sense that no other production is quite as rigorous as Fincher’s. Shooting one scene, a crew member suggests they gloss over a detail (“I’m inclined to say it doesn’t matter”), but Franklin interjects, “Yeah, we could do that, but ‘you-know-who’, that’s his whole thing.” The next day the two directors will have a chat about the need for additional shooting and, after Fincher leaves, another crew member turns to Franklin and smiles: “He came in like a phantom, crushed your dreams and went away!” Franklin nods, “That finish line just gets further and further away!”

There’s affection in the resignation, though. After the shoot, catching up on the phone, the 70-year-old director will marvel: “He sees the invisible. And we all do, but his version of the invisible sometimes means reconstructing, deconstructing and then reconstructing reality… Steven Soderbergh and I had a conversation about it. He was saying he feels like a graffiti artist compared to David.”

ANDREW DOMINIK, WHO GOT TO KNOW

Fincher through their mutual friend Brad Pitt, was specifically engaged to tackle Manson, who he’d been fascinated by growing up. “Somebody who can come up with their own mythology and then persuade other people of the reality of that. And also that they managed to convict a guy who wasn’t at either crime scene. It’s a really interesting thing.”

Fincher credits Dominik with really challenging what they were looking to do with Manson how to make sure his presence was serving a purpose outside of his notoriety. “We don’t need to up the salacious mythology of Manson,” says Fincher. “He does just fine by himself. But what was interesting was Andrew began, months before we came to shoot, to really challenge, like, ‘What is it you want out of Manson, other than like a guest star? ’Cause that’s just silliness.’”

While as a director Franklin is something of a shepherd, Dominik is more of a provocateur. McCallany mentions they often had different ideas on how to play a scene. In the Manson interview, in particular, it had combustible results. “Andrew got me so riled and kind of off-balance and unsettled that I found myself having these crazy reactions,” says the actor.

“Like, my face is twitching and I’m looking at Manson like I’m going to jump across the table and strangle him.”

Dominik describes his directing style as “creating collisions between people” and he definitely set out to get a reaction from McCallany. “Holt is an actor who is superprepared, right? He knows his lines. He knows everybody else’s lines. And he plays the guy who always knows what’s going on. So when he comes to work, that very need — of wanting to feel prepared — is not what you need in the scene. You want a guy who’s being blindsided all the time. And so I think a lot of what I was doing was trying to get Holt to feel blindsided or uncomfortable.”

The infamous killers were physically recreated with the help of Kazu Hiro, who won an Oscar for transforming Gary Oldman into Winston Churchill on Darkest Hour. “He’d kind of retired and we just called and begged,” says Fincher, who initially had him agree to do just Manson. “And then we said, ‘Oh, what about Berkowitz?’” Empire has seen the ‘Son of Sam’ interview and the resemblance is uncanny — the scene electric.

“The thing that makes Son of Sam interesting to me was the crippling stranglehold that he had on one of the largest cities in the world [New York],” says Fincher. “And then you meet him and he’s so mundane. He’s not the guy next door, but he could be. And I think that’s in keeping with the tenor of what we set up with the first season, which is, ‘This is not gonna be the serial killer of the week.’”

Still, even as the Berkowitz interview prods and picks at the self-mythologising nature of these killers, there is undoubtedly a frisson from facing such famous psychopaths. “Part of the appeal of Mindhunter is that it is the all-stars. [The killers] are wildly entertaining when they’re on screen,” says Dominik. “Enjoying somebody in a television show isn’t the same as condoning their behaviour.”

Still, the Kiwi-born/Australia-raised director would suggest that that isn’t really what the show is about. “I think David’s real idea is that he wants to make a show about the American disease, which is narcissism. This idea that we shape the world according to our desires and our needs. And I think he looks at profiling as being a great way to tell that story.” In that sense Mindhunter is as much about bureaucracy and personality as it is murder. “The subject of the show is really the profilers themselves,” he offers by way of explanation.

THERE’S AN ELEMENT TO MINDHUNTER

that explores the masks we all wear. “You get inside the psychology of the killers, but you also are inside of the psychology of the investigators,” says Franklin. “You actually begin to inadvertently start to profile these people.”

Pressure grows as the Behavioural Science Unit grows, powered by the funding of new FBI overseer Ted Gunn (Michael Cerveris). Fincher observes: “As David Geffen once said to me, ‘The devil is the one who shows up with the biggest cheque.’ You gotta watch out for the person who’s going to give you your heart’s desire.” Tench is pulled more between work and home, Holden between ambition and personal frailty, and in-house academic Dr Wendy Carr (Anna Torv) struggles with the Unit’s changed priorities. “You get to see a different dimension, so you see that persona, that mask, she has is her work face,” says Torv, whose character sees her theories co-opted into live investigations, rather than the psychological research she signed up for. “What is her function? If this is being applied to real-world cases and that’s not a place where she [functions], what is she doing there? She’s given up her life.”

It might be reductive to suggest Dr Carr is the most vulnerable person in the team, but she has the most to lose. “I mean, she’s a gay woman living in the late 1970s having to hide it from everybody around.” She also appears to be the person whom viewers treasure. Groff says one of the things he is asked most about Season 1 is Carr’s recurring interaction with a cat in her apartment building. It’s the same for Torv, who has her own theory as to what the ill-fated feline represents. “I’d always thought of the cat as being like one of the faceless many, the people these serial killers practised on. But we never hear about the homeless and the abandoned and the people that go missing that nobody misses.”

It’s a bleak thought, but in tune with the spirit of the show, which is uniquely unsettling despite featuring no explicit brutality. “Hearing about these things can be way more effective than seeing them literally played out in front of you,” says Groff. “It forces the audience to lean in a little bit more and become a little bit more engaged, and therefore I think a little bit more scared.”

There’s an extended sequence in an early episode of the new season where someone who escaped a killer recounts their experiences — what happened to them, what happened to the person they were with. There is no blood, blade or bullet, but it will haunt you for a long, long time.

While the likes of Manson, Berkowitz and BTK still make the headlines, the show is more concerned with the consequences of violence.

“David’s intention from the beginning was like, ‘These are sad, disgusting individuals. I don’t wanna celebrate them. I don’t want this to be the comic-book version of villains,’” recalls Groff, who contrasts that approach with a lot of the films and documentaries he has watched in relation to serial-killer material. “It’s like, ‘Ooh, creepy music and weird cutaways of knives and blood’, and they really lean into the melodrama of what happened. That is not what David wanted to do with this. He wanted to look at it in a very realistic way. Which is more unsettling and scary.”

Unsettling for the viewer. Unsettling for the cast. Through being matter-of-fact and eschewing the sensational, Mindhunter really gets inside your head. Jones recalls leaving his New York home to travel to the production. “I do remember going down to work and telling my wife, ‘Make sure that that window is locked in the bedroom when I’m gone, please. Just for me. Just make sure that it’s locked.’”

C U Lt M Ov I E S

MINDHUNTER ISN’T THE ONLY PROJECT TACKLING CHARLES MANSON IN 2019

Once Upon A Time In Hollywood

Set five decades ago, in the year Manson’s followers committed their notorious murders, Quentin Tarantino’s Pacific Coast epic shares its Manson with Mindhunter (actor Damon Herriman). Tarantino recreated the cult leader’s ranch close to its actual location, calling the set “kinda spooky”.

The Haunting Of Sharon Tate

Starring Hilary Duff as the doomed star, this film was inspired by a quote in an interview Tate gave a year before her murder, saying that she’d had premonitions of her death at the hands of a satanic cult. Tate’s sister Debra has called the endeavour “classless”.

Charlie Says

Matt Smith plays Manson in flashbacks, but this indie drama is focused more on his followers, putting three of them (played by Sosie Bacon, Marianne Rendon and Game Of Thrones’ Hannah Murray) up front. It’s set three years after the 1969 killings.

Tate

Endorsed enthusiastically by Debra Tate, this is a straightup biopic of Sharon Tate, following her from her beauty-pageant days to her death at the age of 26. Kate Bosworth, who stars, has said the film will “take away the microphone from the maniac”, minimising Manson’s presence in the story. NICK DE SEMLYEN

AS HE PREPARES TO UNLEASH

A DEFINITIVE NEW CUT OF HIS

WAR EPIC, FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA

REFLECTS ON WHY APOCALYPSE

NOW HAS LOST NONE OF ITS CHILLING PO WER a voice rang out over a sky full of burning palm trees. In fact, it was just the beginning. When Apocalypse Now blazed into cinemas 40 years ago, it opened with a scene that’s as mesmerising today as it was in 1979. A jungle engulfed in flames blurs into a face haunted by untold terrors, his head — and seemingly, world — turned upside down. The noise of distant helicopter blades accompanies the sight of a spinning hotel ceiling fan, as strange visions of ancient relics fade in and out of frame. All the while, that voice carries on, the sorrowful sound of Doors singer Jim Morrison: “This is the end…”

It was the start of not just a cinematic masterpiece — director Francis Ford Coppola’s hallucinogenic war epic about a soldier’s mission into the heart of darkness — but a cultural obsession. Coppola’s vision has clung to the public imagination with napalm-like stickiness ever since. It’s regularly referenced and parodied, and appears time and again atop polls determining the greatest movies of all time. The Vietnam conflict it depicted may be over, but Apocalypse Now’s take on the dark, primal power lurking in man remains scarily relevant in 2019’s time of terrorism, drones shot down over Iran and containment camps for migrants in America.

Apocalypse Now has never become Apocalypse Then. It isn’t merely a film about Vietnam, nor one about the darkness war brings out in those who fight it. It’s a movie about the darkness within us that makes war inevitable: the recurring catastrophe our species can’t stop venturing up river towards. It might always remain relevant for precisely this reason, suggests the man who risked everything to make it.

“It’s outrageous what we do to each other, what’s going on in the world,” sighs Coppola himself. “Human beings are the only species that can believe in fictions. Corporations. Religions. Nationalism. Terrible things have been done in the name of these fictions — and they’re still being done.”

•••

Empire’s conversation with Coppola, a rare extensive interview for the filmmaking legend, is taking place on a hot June morning in Bologna, Italy, in a hotel near the city’s Piazza Maggiore; tonight, thousands will congregate in the square for an open-air screening of a new version of Apocalypse Now, branded the ‘Final Cut’. The director is 80 now but still strapping and handsome, turning up today in a fashionable jacket-and-cravat combination. He’s gentler and more playful than you might expect, too, if you’ve heard the stories from the film’s famously disastrous shoot. While making his magnum opus, depression, pressure, power and money turned Coppola into a Colonel Kurtz-like monster, or so the legend goes. His production became as chaotic and consumed by madness as the war he was there to depict, or so Hollywood lore would have you believe.

He’ll confirm which of the many outlandish rumours that have swirled around Apocalypse Now ever since are true, and which are false. But first, he wants to explain how elated he is that his film remains resonant. “Awards are voted for by people. Depending on who those people are, you win or lose. But the test of time is something that’s not controlled by anyone,” he smiles. “To me, the real judgement as to whether what you did was successful is if people are still watching it 20, 30, 40 years later.”

Its longevity might be because the film grapples with the same questions great art has always sought to answer. “When I made a movie, I always wanted to know what its theme was, in one word if I could,” he says. His acclaimed

Godfather

films, released prior

to Apocalypse Now and earning the Californian nine Oscars, were about succession. Apocalypse Now, arriving five years after his second chapter in the Corleone saga, dealt with morality. “There was one sentence in the script I always felt was the gist of the entire movie. Which was, and pardon the language: ‘We teach the boys to drop fire on people. Yet we won’t let them write the word “fuck” on an airplane because it’s obscene.’ This strange contradiction, that sometimes what we know is morally wrong can be turned around and made morally right in certain religious and nationalist contexts, is very troublesome.”

Themes such as succession and morality are everywhere in ancient stories, in Greek myths and Persian poetry: they’re timeless topics for dramatists, Coppola explains. “So if your movie deals with those sorts of essential themes, there’s a chance your movie might survive.”

Apocalypse Now has survived. But Coppola and his cast almost didn’t in the process of making it. Grab your surfboard: the director of one of the most celebrated films of its era wants to take you on a journey through its troubled creation, a production that endured typhoons, terror threats, tropical diseases and much more. “The film is a reflection of the circumstances of how it was made,” he says. “Would it have been the same end product if making it had been a smooth ride? No way. If it had been made in a sane, logical way, it’d have been a sane, logical movie. And war is an insane, illogical thing. Was then, and it is now.”

•••

In a parallel universe, Star Wars never happened. Instead, a young George Lucas went wading through landmine-littered fields on location in Vietnam, slap-bang in the middle of actual combat. This was the original plan for Apocalypse Now: a guerilla-style, 16mm adaptation of screenwriter John Milius’ script, loosely based on the novella Heart Of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. Coppola had taken Lucas and Milius under his wing and into his inner circle: a filmmaking cabal named Zoetrope. Funnily enough, Warner Bros., the studio Coppola had pitched the script to, had some reservations about packing a cast and crew off to a literal war zone. Apocalypse Now was rejected, so Coppola put a pin in it. He made The Godfather, then The Conversation, then in 1974, The Godfather Part II This run of artful box-office hits made him a king of New Hollywood: an auteur with endless acclaim and ambition in his belly. His next project, he decided, would be Apocalypse Now Except it would no longer be a scrappy, band-on-the-run type movie. It was to be an epic unlike anything else that had been seen on screen before.

“I thought, ‘Hey, maybe I should do it as this big war picture,’” he remembers. “In those days, we were always trying to do a big picture that’d be successful, so that we’d have some money to do little pictures.” He had no real personal connection to the conflict that he wanted to exorcise, no friend or relative who went to ❯

Vietnam and never came back, whose death he’d hoped to process. “I can’t say I did it for any moralistic reason — it was just practical. No-one else was there. I owned the script, after Warner Bros. rejected it. So I just decided I’d do it myself.”

The film would be shot in the Philippines. But still, Coppola faced problems. Firstly: no-one wanted to finance it. The US military’s loss in Vietnam was still a raw topic that studios weren’t sure they wanted to touch. Coppola, in fact, got so frustrated at his inability to find funding that one night he threw all his Oscars out of a window, damaging them in a fit of fury. His mother ended up asking the Academy for replacements, making up a lie about a clumsy cleaner.

Problem number two was that no-one wanted to be in it. Production was to take six weeks. None of the stars Coppola approached wanted to spend that long in swamps and rice fields: not Steve McQueen, not Jack Nicholson, not Robert Redford or Tommy Lee Jones. “I offered Al Pacino any role he wanted, because I had no actors who would go. I was desperate. I said to both Al and Bobby De Niro they could play any part they wanted: ‘Take your pick!’”

Coppola decided to self-finance the picture, eventually persuading Harvey Keitel to play Captain Willard: a military man with demons of his own, sent to assassinate a colonel who’s seemingly gone insane, played by Marlon Brando. The first hiccup came when Coppola realised he had to fire Keitel soon into filming: he didn’t command the right darkness. Hours of footage were ruined, with scenes needing to be reshot and Willard recast. On most movie sets, this would constitute disaster. On Apocalypse Now, it ended up being a minor blip compared to the catastrophes to come.

“I was very distraught, very worried,” Coppola recalls of a shoot that plunged headlong into pandemonium. Cast and crew were struck down with tropical diseases. The Philippine army, who’d loaned the production helicopters and vehicles, kept stopping the shoot so they could tackle Communist insurgents hidden in the hills. At one point, the director was warned that the set may be attacked. The production was already millions over budget and weeks behind schedule when in May 1976 a typhoon wrecked their set, halting filming for two months. Brando turned up underprepared and overweight (“I didn’t know what kind of costume to put him in because you couldn’t have a military costume — they didn’t make them that big!” chuckles Coppola). And while shooting the scenes at Kurtz’s compound, police threatened to seize the crew’s passports after it transpired actual dead bodies were being used on set, supplied by a grave robber who sold cadavers to medical schools for autopsies. Coppola wasn’t aware at the time but says today: “Knowing the mentality of the prop department… that’s very possible.”

On 5 March 1977, a year after the film began shooting, star Martin Sheen, roped in to replace Keitel, suffered a heart attack. According to reports, this was the moment Coppola — whose family faced bankruptcy if Apocalypse Now was abandoned — imploded, suffering an epileptic seizure as guilt and stress finally broke him. “That’s not quite true,” he clarifies. “I felt no responsibility. Martin was a big smoker. And also every morning he’d jog like five miles. Obviously that was bad for him, to be such a serious smoker and to be exerting himself in the morning like that. I was concerned that I was going to lose him because he was a wonderful person.”

Coppola found himself juggling his worry for his star with his need to keep things rolling: the banks he’d borrowed from, he feared, would pull the plug on his production if they heard Sheen was unwell. “What I told his wife was, ‘Let’s take him immediately to the best possible care, but just don’t take him out of the movie. I’ll keep shooting while you’re gone.’ And I did. I shot for the whole time he was gone with his brother. Eventually he did come back, thank God.”

It all sounds, well, apocalyptic. But Coppola’s official line is that it really wasn’t so bad. “It’s normal when a director is making a film [that] they’re in a state of fear. ‘I’m falling behind, I’m gonna get fired! This is the worst movie ever made!’ People are very self-doubting. All artists are. Even very acclaimed artists get frightened. It’s part of the work.” In Hearts Of Darkness, the 1991 ‘making of’ documentary that uses on-set footage shot by his wife Eleanor, he describes wanting to kill himself. Was that just talk, a fleeting moment of terror? He pauses. “I’ve never really felt close to suicidal thoughts,” he says. “I was scared because I knew I was getting into danger of financial ruin. [But] I figured, ‘Hey, I was born poor.’ The idea of being poor [again] wasn’t scary to me.” With each setback, Coppola picked himself back up. He had to finish Apocalypse Now. What other option was there?

•••

Somehow, against the odds, the movie came together. A new ending was written and filmed on the fly, replacing a big battle (“Willard decides to stand alongside Kurtz, and at the end they’re firing together. It didn’t work”). It had been an unspeakably painful shoot that Coppola still can’t quite believe he made it through; if they were making it today, he says, he’d use greenscreen. The film bowed at the 1979 Cannes Film Festival, where it won Coppola a second Palme d’Or, making him only the second director to win the award twice. Reviews were mixed at first but audiences kept coming back. Key scenes soon became ingrained in pop culture: the baptismal shot of Willard emerging from water, ready to carry out his murderous mission, for example, became one of the defining images of 1970s US cinema. “It’s supposed to show the human being emerging from the chaos to face this strange destiny,” says Coppola today. Robert Duvall’s line about “the smell of napalm in the morning” took on a life of its own, as did the film’s showpiece moment: a helicopter ambush in which the US military obliterates a village to the blaring din of ‘Ride Of The Valkyries’.

The story of that sequence sums up the entire chaotic nature of making Apocalypse Now “I didn’t know how to do it. But I had the confidence to trust that I’d learn how to do it while I’m there,” says Coppola. “It takes a lot of courage to not know what you’re doing and just go ahead on the assurance that you’ll figure it out. That’s the secret of life, really.”

In 2004, the year after US soldiers invaded Iraq, news footage showed troops going into battle using music to psych themselves up. The track, as they crashed through Fallujah front doors and reduced homes to rubble, was ‘Ride Of The Valkyries’. Art imitates life and life imitates art. Apocalypse Now retains a prominent place in our cinematic landscape because of moments like these: reminders that mankind’s capacity for madness remains intact. Apocalypse Now still captivates at 40, and Coppola hopes it will another four decades down the line. “Then we’ll see if it’s really stood the test of time,” he laughs. In other words — this isn’t the end. Not by a long shot.

2017’S KONG: SKULL ISLAND WAS DEVISED AS A LOVE LETTER TO COPPOLA’S MASTERPIECE. DIRECTOR JORDAN VOGT-ROBERTS WRITES EXCLUSIVELY ABOUT HIS PASSION FOR THE FILM

Apocalypse Now belongs to an extremely rare echelon of films. This might seem odd, but to talk about it I need to evoke Chinatown It’ll make sense in a minute… If a filmmaker ever pitches you a character relationship that attempts to approximate the Möbius strip filled with obsession and madness embodied by Willard and Kurtz… trust me, when I say it won’t work. Likewise, if someone pitches a Jake Gittes-esque arc of a guy who makes it his business to not get involved, but he gets involved along the way it won’t work. These are films that are referenced frequently (by me included), but the reference is meaningless because they are singular entities that can never be recreated. The elements within cannot be transferred into another film because they only existed once. Few films can claim this potency, and Apocalypse Now hits you in a way that cannot be reproduced. The film is like a deep-tissue massage if you fight it, it’ll hurt. Instead you must relax and surrender to it.

So, with that being said Kong: Skull Island was my love letter to all things Coppola and Vietnam. I could never hope to recreate it, but I could loudly beat my chest and roar with adoration. I give full credit to [producers] Mary Parent, Thomas Tull, Jon Jashni and Alex Garcia, who didn’t laugh when I pitched Ray Harryhausen-thrown-in-a-blender-withApocalypse Now. I never thought a studio would want to make it, but I’m glad they did.

The very first piece of concept art I had made for Skull Island was a collaboration with the great ‘Crash’ McCreery [concept art supremo]. This was the progenitor image seared into my brain that gave birth to my film. But it all started with ‘Hueys’ and napalm in the morning. Then somehow... it gave birth to this . Thank you, Francis Ford Coppola. You are my Kurtz.

FEATURING DRUGS, BOOZE AND FLAMING PUBES, SUNDANCE SMASH

ANIMALS IS THAT RARE THING: A DEBAUCHED ODE TO FEMALE FRIENDSHIP. ITS CAST AND CREATORS EXPLAIN HOW THIS YEAR’S INDIE CHARMER MADE IT TO THE BIG SCREEN

The Characters Of Animals

need no introduction,because you’ve met them before. In bars and on buses and at house parties where fag ends and beer bottles lie scattered across carpets. You’ve met them spilling out of clubs and into taxis, then again the next morning in the queue for self-check-out tills, bumper packs of paracetamol in basket. You might even be one yourself. There’s only one place you don’t run into them often: on cinema screens. “These are raw, imperfect modern women,” says Emma Jane Unsworth, who wrote the riotous new comingof-age drama, about two wine-demolishing Dubliners drifting through life in a blur of boys and booze. “You know those patriarchal arcs in movies where you’ve got this messy woman who decides to finally sort herself out, throw all the alcohol in her house away, stop having sex and start settling down? Urghhh!” she groans. “We wanted to mess that up. They present women as this thing that needs to be fixed, to be tamed. We wanted to do something different.”

So while the characters of Animals need no introduction, let’s do so anyway. Laura and Tyler are two witty, wisecracking BFFs living in a flat covered in clothes and Polaroids detailing past escapades. It’s a type of friendship that’s scarcely seen on film. “Female friendships are very under-represented. Quite often they’re secondary to the love story,” says Holliday Grainger, who plays Laura. “It’s the way they’re represented as well. In Animals, you see all the flaws in their friendship. The good, the bad and the ugly.”

Laura is a local gal, a coffee-shop barista who tells her family (and herself) she’s writing a novel, but has amassed a grand total of 10 pages in 10 years. “She always anticipated it just happening to her. Instead she’s discovering it won’t just fall into her lap,” explains director Sophie Hyde. “In her romantic life, meanwhile, she’s caught in this tug of war — between her desire for convention and a kind of political urge to reject that convention.”

Tyler, played by Alia Shawkat, meanwhile, is an American abroad who oozes glamour (brace yourself for an explosion of tweets declaring her various combinations of fur coats and cowboy boots “A GIANT MOOD” when the film arrives this month). Tyler rebels against everything from parenthood to sanitary pads, and shakes hangovers off with a swish of her sunglasses. “If she had it her way, she’d avoid all that adulthood shit forever, and she and Laura would just party ’til they grew old and died,” laughs Shawkat. “Her biggest strength is her biggest weakness — she knows how to have fun, to enjoy the present, to see the magic of life outside of normalcy that a lot of people waste their lives on. But she probably leans a little too far into all that.”

This all changes when Laura meets Jim (Fra Fee), a straight-and-narrow pianist who inspires her to shake off her hedonistic habits — and cracks in her and Tyler’s friendship start to show. For years, they’ve pissed, puked and partied their way to oblivion every weekend. Now, as Laura and Tyler contend with their early thirties, they appear to be on different courses. “It comes with that time,” says Hyde. “We all have an expectation of what our lives will be at that age, the people we’ll become. In our twenties, we can be anything. Then suddenly you hit 30 and it’s like, ‘Oh — I’ve gotta choose.’ Choosing one path means giving up the option of others.

So you’re there staring into the void of all the things you no longer could be, all the lives you’ll never live. That’s terrifying.”

No-one ever prepares you for the types of crisis turning 30 can create, as a gulf opens up between the person you are and the person you feel under pressure to be. Animals drops you deep into that emotional warzone, Hyde’s camera wading through every debauched detail of Laura and Tyler’s attempts to escape it. Animals is the stench of cigarette ash, the smear of mascara, the slow, dreaded creep of morning light under curtains at a house party that should have ended hours ago. Close your eyes and you can almost taste on your tongue a Sambuca shot from long ago. It’s one of the year’s most poignant and laugh-out-loud dramas, buoyed by brilliant performances and a hilarious, heartfelt script that went down a storm at Sundance. Where did it come from, how did Absolutely Fabulous help inspire it, and just how exactly does one end up accidentally committing an act of arson on one’s own pubic hair? It’s a story that begins on the Manchester club scene, with a man named Chicken Sandwich.

Unsworth Was In

her late twenties when things began to change. “I was really aware that I was one of the remaining few from my friendship group who hadn’t settled down, who hadn’t found a partner, hadn’t established a career and wasn’t really thinking about those things,” she recalls on a warm Sunday afternoon from her Brighton home. She’d been living in Manchester, where she grew up, getting a taste for raves and recklessness that she clung on to, as her friends began having kids. “I was still partying and I felt really judged for all that. I knew I wanted to channel that feeling of judgement into something.”

So the writer and journalist began penning Animals, her second novel, released in 2014. It collected stories from her own experiences as a party person. “A lot of it is from wild nights out and wild nights out I’ve been told of. I’m a great stealer of anecdotes,” grins Unsworth. “Then I popped it into a great big soup that I twisted to make work for the story.”

Tyler was based on a friend at university called Alison Taylor. The spaced-out drug dealer Tyler and Laura meet early in the film who introduces himself as Chicken Sandwich was based on a real-life dealer with the same name (“It was one of the great joys of my life to make him a character in this. I love that there’s an actor now with Chicken Sandwich on his IMDb page”). The baptism by Beaujolais that occurs when a drunken Laura meets her baby niece and proceeds to accidentally splash wine in their face was based on an unfortunate

❯ incident at a music festival (that’s Ribena in the movie, by the way; no babies were inebriated in the making of this movie). The flashback in which Jean (Amy Molloy), Laura’s sister, gets naked, starts dancing on a bartop and manages to torch her genitals with a tealight also really happened. “It was a friend of mine! Yes, that was one rather crazy dinner party…”

What started off as “a story about two women, this comedy duo running around town drinking and being pretentious but hopefully also charming and hilarious as well, snowballed into something else: this ferocious thing about our bodies, social milestones and things like that,” says Unsworth. The result was the book Animals — a relatable read that prompted rave reviews, including one from writer Caitlin Moran describing it as “Withnail for girls”. When it was optioned for big-screen adaptation and turned into a screenplay by Unsworth herself, with acclaimed Australian filmmaker Hyde brought on to direct, the script brought back plenty of memories for Shawkat and Grainger, who were invited to read for the film’s tearaway leads.

“There’s definitely a part of me that was very alive in my early twenties that likes to hang out and have a drink, to get loose and see where the night goes. I think when I was younger, I interpreted the idea of boldness, how to be bold, as partying. Like, ‘Okay, let’s see how crazy we can get!’” says Shawkat. “I definitely pulled from that memory of a time when the night is endless,” says Shawkat, “which is something I liked about Tyler. For all her flaws, she has this poetic vision of anything being possible tonight, so why not chase it?”

This is usually where an actor recounts what drew them to the role. With Shawkat, there’s no need: the 30-year-old has spent her entire career to date exploring adults who refuse to grow up (she’s best known for playing Maeby in cult sitcom Arrested Development) and intimate female friendships, in indie fare like Search Party and the drama Duck Butter, which she also co-wrote. The relationship at the fore of Animals and the freewheeling spirit of her Peter Pan partier — Tyler makes the schemers of Arrested Development look like a wizened group of investment bankers in comparison — made accepting the role a no-brainer.

“I was so excited. Exploring a close female relationship wasn’t particularly new to me, but the dynamic between those friends was new. When we did rehearsals, we talked a lot about how intense those friendships can be: almost like romantic relationships, just without the sex,” she explains. “They can get very interpersonal and confusing and manipulative.”

Grainger agrees. “As much as they’ll always have heartstrings attached to each other, they need to go and explore something for themselves,” says the 31-year-old. “You find yourself questioning as you get older, towards your thirties, is this person actually good for me?” adds Shawkat. “I know we have fun together and have a lot of memories, but I don’t know if this is who I want to be. And that was actually something I’ve been dealing with in my own life. I’ve had to ask myself the same question.”

“I wanted to crack open the myths that might be trapping me and other women like me, myths that have been allowed to enclose me, putting this pressure on,” Unsworth recalls of writing Animals. There’s a moment in the film where Tyler asks Jim, “What kind of person are you?”, thrown by Laura’s love interest’s smart shoes and sensible approach to the world. In Animals, just like in real life, everyone is secretly asking themselves the same question.

Shawkat Has A

problem. “I CRAVE IT!” she exclaims, explaining how she’s been unable to quench her thirst for Guinness since returning to LA from the film’s shoot last year. She, Grainger and the crew “went a little bit Method actor” while making Animals. How are you supposed to capture the chaos of clubland Dublin without spending time in its bars? “We hit it hard on the weekends. We didn’t go quite to the extremes of Tyler and Laura but there were a few nights where we saw the sun come up,” she laughs.

The novel had been set in Manchester, but its big screen adaptation takes place in Ireland.

“This was a funding issue,” says Unsworth, “a compromise we could make without losing the beating heart of the film.” Movies like Animals, about real, flawed women and their non-romantic relationships, don’t generally get made, because according to industry myth, they don’t tend to make money. As a result, the team behind the film had to search far and wide for financial backers. Eventually, enough cash was scraped together to make the film, from a variety of different benefactors, including Screen Australia, Screen Ireland, The South Australian Film Corporation and Creative England.

“I didn’t have enough experience of the whole being optioned process to know what I could expect,” says Unsworth. “Now I know it’s quite lucky to get a film like this to be made and for me to be offered the chance to write it, especially as I hadn’t written a screenplay before.”

To sweeten the deal for their Irish backers, a new setting for Laura and Tyler’s antics was decided upon: Dublin. At first, this gutted proud Manc Unsworth. “I really wanted it to be set there, to be a love letter to my city.” It actually ended up sharpening some of the script’s themes. “Sex is a way of reminding myself I have a body,” Laura confides in the film. “In my twenties it was a way to forget. In my thirties it’s a way to remember.” In Ireland, women still battle to enjoy this kind of agency over their bodies: it wasn’t until this year that a near-total ban on abortion was lifted in the country. The battle for women’s rights over their own bodies didn’t end there: some hospitals have refused to carry out certain terminations, as the country struggles to balance its religious foundations with the right for women to have control over their own reproductive systems. An hour’s drive away, in Northern Ireland, abortion is still illegal (in almost every circumstance): more than 1,000 Northern Irish women travelled to the UK last year to have terminations, while a 21-year-old woman was recently given a three-month suspended prison sentence for buying abortion pills online.

“It’s a film about women’s bodies,” says Unsworth. “What they feel like they should stop doing with their bodies at a certain age, and what they should start doing with their bodies at a certain age. So yeah, that definitely felt... intensified.” And anyways, Dubliners and Mancunians are very similar, says Grainger, a fellow Mancunian (though you’d hardly believe it from her impressive Dublin accent in Animals). “As cities they’ve both got very strong literary and musical histories,” she reasons. “There’s a pride and a no-nonsense attitude its people have.”

Once assembled in Ireland, Hyde, her cast and crew began putting together a movie inspired by serious cult classics. “Withnail And I was a big influence, just in terms of the characters but also visually,” says the director, who learned a thing or two about intimate portraits of characters striving for change making her debut feature, 52 Tuesdays, about a parent undergoing gender reassignment. “Lynne Ramsay’s Morvern Callar, and Lost In Translation were touchstones too. We were looking for films that elevated Animals out of broad comedy but still had a comic feeling. We even took a little bit of Absolutely Fabulous Gotta love Ab Fab!”

The finished product is a drama not a million miles from two other empowering tales of women coming into their own: 2019 critical smashes Eighth Grade and Booksmart. “Most people think of coming of age at 16 or 17. But this is just another type of coming of age, into adulthood,” Hyde explains.

You may not have seen characters like Laura and Tyler on your screens much before, but after Animals, that may be about to change. “You want faces that feel real, bodies that aren’t pretty and perfect,” says the director. “To me, there’s such beauty in watching people like this, and like us, expressing their flaws. In broad comedies you have a lot of girls-gone-wild sort of stuff, but not where they’re real characters trying to figure life out.” Animals’ cast and creators want to inspire more stories like it, putting more riveting, riotous tales of female friendships in front of audiences. That’s change everyone should raise a glass to. Just be careful not to spill it on any newborns.

THE FIRST SUMMER BLOCKBUSTER JAWS WAS FAMOUSLY BUT JAWS 2 MADE IT LOOK LIKE A DAY AT THE BEACH

A HELLISH MOVIE TO MAKE.

It took a few moments before Jeannot Szwarc realised he was throttling the star of his movie. The 39-year-old FrenchPolish director of Jaws 2 had agreed to an emergency meeting with Roy Scheider, producer David Brown and Universal Studios production executive Verna Fields (who had edited the first Jaws). It was intended to clear the air between Szwarc and Scheider. Just over two months into a testing, mostly water-based shoot at a remote location on the Florida Panhandle, tension between the two was at breaking point.

Scheider, who’d reluctantly returned to the role of Amity Island police chief Martin Brody as a contractual obligation, contended that Szwarc’s attention was unduly absorbed by the shark a second great white now stalking Amity’s waters. Szwarc, an emergency hire after Jaws 2’s first director was fired, emphasised that he needed to focus on the mechanical shark, which remained just as cumbersome and prone to malfunction as it had on the first film. Eventually Szwarc snapped. “Look, I gotta get this picture done,” he spat, “and I don’t wanna spend all my time worrying about your ego.”

That was when Scheider swung at him.

“I don’t know what happened,” Szwarc recalls, laughing, almost 42 years later, “but suddenly he’s on the floor on his back and I have my hands around his neck. David and Verna are yelling, ‘Jeannot, stop it! You’re gonna ruin your career!’”

Szwarc’s career survived the assault. But shooting Jaws 2 would test him, and everyone involved, to their limits. As Szwarc puts it, “It was a war.”

After the travails suffered by Spielberg and his crew during an arduous five-and-a-half-month New England shoot in 1974, and despite costing more than twice its original $4 million budget, Jaws was a phenomenal success. It was, at the time, the highest-grossing feature film in cinema history. Though sequels were not yet the studios’ instinctive response to success, and were then justifiably seen as an exercise in diminishing returns, Jaws was too big to ignore. Within weeks of its release, its producers, Richard Zanuck and David Brown, decided they’d be fools not to take a second bite at the box office.

But Spielberg wanted nothing to do with it. He was already deep into Close Encounters Of The Third Kind Besides, says Carl Gottlieb, co-screenwriter of Jaws and rewriter of Jaws 2, “There was no honour in doing a sequel.”

Zanuck and Brown’s initial choice for the filmmaker to step into Spielberg’s deck shoes remains, to this day, mystifying. John D. Hancock had a moderate success with Robert De Niro baseball drama Bang The Drum Slowly, but it hardly suggested he’d be able to handle a sea-based spectacle like Jaws 2

“I really have no idea why they chose him,” admits Joe Alves, who’d served as production designer on Jaws and returned in that role, with the additional responsibilities of associate producer and second unit director, for the sequel. “John hadn’t done any action movies. It was an interesting choice.”

At the insistence of Universal studio boss Sid Sheinberg, Jaws 2 was to be a “kids in jeopardy” story. Set four years later, it would see the arrival of a second giant great white in Amity’s summer waters, stalking and gnashing a gang of seaborne teenagers, including Brody’s children. Hancock’s Amity was on the skids, a town that had never recovered from the ’75 shark attacks: a “haunted, darker, moodier” place, as Hancock described it.

The shoot kicked off in early June 1977, back in the Edgartown district of Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, which had doubled for Amity in the first film. Few of its residents were pleased; “Universal Go Home” and “Jaws Bites” T-shirts were a common sight on Edgartown’s streets. Still, the plan was not to stay long; Alves was keen to avoid the problem of passing boat traffic, which had plagued the first Jaws, and resolved to move the production to the Gulf of Mexico’s more quiet and temperate waters for all the shark-and-boat action.

The 24-strong special-effects team, under the supervision of Jaws veteran Bob Mattey, set up their ‘Shark City’ workshop in the remote Florida town of Navarre Beach. But back in Edgartown, Hancock was struggling. One day, while shooting a scene with some of the kids on the dock, he announced to Alves he was wrapping at 3pm. “Jesus, John, we got another four hours of daylight,” Alves told him. “What’s the problem?” Hancock was having trouble, he said, “getting the kids lined up and started.” Alves thought, “Jeez, if this is a problem, wait ’til we get to the boats. And the shark.” A few days later, during a trip down to Florida, Alves heard the news: the studio had fired Hancock.

Above: A whale mauled by the new shark. Yikes!

Right: Roy Scheider returns as Amity police chief Martin Brody.

Below: Director Jeannot Szwarc looks through the lens.

“When the dailies started to come in, the studio was aghast,” explains Gottlieb. They were shocked by all the technical flaws. One of the shots was framed so badly it cut one actor off at the neck during their dialogue. And they despised Hancock’s drab, downbeat vision. This was not the big, summer entertainment they craved. Gottlieb recalls Sid Sheinberg grumbling that, “It’s like having people over to your house and serving them a lovely fish dinner, then asking them to come back and giving them hamburger.”

Only 18 days into production, with $2 million already spent on a mechanical shark that hadn’t even yet been filmed, the biggest sequel ever made suddenly shut down.

For two weeks the production teetered on a cliff’s edge. If the film was to survive, the studio needed someone who would work fast, who ideally would keep Hancock’s crew, and who wasn’t big enough to make demands. Alves found the solution.

“I had worked with a lot of young directors on Rod Serling’s television series Night Gallery, including Steven Spielberg and John Badham,” he says. “There was one I really liked: Jeannot Szwarc. He had directed most of them. He was very clever, we had a good relationship, and he had a movie out called Bug [a horror about mutant, fire-starting cockroaches], so I suggested him.”

Szwarc wasn’t impressed with what Universal proposed he work with. The script, he says, “needed work,” while Hancock’s footage was “absolutely the worst thing I have ever seen in my entire life.” (In the end, only two second-unit shots were used.) But, he tells Empire, “I was young. Also, I knew it was gonna be big. If I pulled it off, it would be good for my career.” So he agreed and plunged straight in, with little over a week to prep.

Gottlieb was parachuted in, too, to extensively rework the script, written by Howard Sackler (who’d devised Quint’s USS Indianapolis monologue for

Jaws) and rewritten by Hancock’s wife, Dorothy Tristan. It was now early August. While Gottlieb was holed up at the Navarre Beach Holiday Inn, working desperately to “put the script together in some shootable form in the time allotted”, Szwarc and Alves got out on the water and cracked on with the action.

Having reasoned that holding back on revealing the shark would feel too much like Spielberg déjà vu, Szwarc resolved to show as much fish-flesh as possible. “I didn’t have Richard Dreyfuss [who refused to be involved without Spielberg]. I didn’t have Robert Shaw. And I didn’t think people were really too excited about Roy Scheider,” says Szwarc. “So I wanted to do stuff with the shark that has never been done before.’”

For some scenes he placed a cameraman on the shark’s back, sitting in a saddle with a hand-held camera, to pull off ‘fin’s-eye view’ shots. He also insisted that the ‘sled shark’, which was towed into frame by a boat, be rigged to open and close its mouth. This allowed him to pull off the film’s most impressive moment, when the beast narrowly misses making a snack of Brody’s eldest son (Mark Gruner) as he’s heaved into a boat.

But conditions were merciless and the going was slow. It took hours to reset if the sled shark missed its mark, which it often did, usually before sinking to the seabed. The scene where the shark attacks a helicopter took Alves three gruelling days. “The first day the helicopter flipped over and broke the propellers. The next day the shark missed the helicopter and attacked a camera boat. The third day, I finally got the shark to attack the helicopter.”

There were some near misses, too. “Working with the shark was mostly incredibly boring, because it would take forever to do anything,” says Keith Gordon. At 16 years old, he was one of the youngest cast members, on his first-ever movie in the role of class clown Doug, one of the 17 teenagers terrorised by the great white during the final act. “But there were times when it was incredibly scary.”

Such as the experience of shooting the scene where Doug’s boat is capsized. “There weren’t a lot of safety people around and we were out in the middle of nowhere,” Gordon says. “The sled shark would hit my boat at 40 kilometeres per hour, and I got knocked into the water a bunch of times. One time, my foot got caught in the cables that were pulling the shark. I managed to get loose, but it was scary. Looking back, it was probably way more dangerous than would be allowed these days.”

While none of the cast were seriously hurt, there were injuries among the crew.

First assistant director Scott Maitland was hospitalised after an ocean swell caused him to fall back in a boat and damage his spine.

One of Bob Mattey’s special-effects crew fractured three ribs while tussling with heavy sharkmachinery out on the sea. And four divers were stung by jellyfish.

The days were long and the shoot dragged on. So long, in fact, that to have any chance of completing principal photography by Christmas, Szwarc had to implore his cast and crew to work for 22 days straight without a break. Though he at least ensured that every Saturday would end with a big cast-and-crew booze-up on Universal’s dollar.

It was very hard work,” the director says, “but the ambience was very good.” His young cast coped admirably, too, buoyed by the fact that they were far from home and having a bit of an adventure. “It was kind of like being on [castaway TV show] Survivor,” laughs Gordon. “It was pretty cool.” The only main player who openly expressed their vexation was Scheider. “Yes, my main actor was a little bit of a pain in the neck,” sighs Szwarc. “Roy didn’t want to do the picture, but the studio had him by the balls. He was a great actor, but not a very nice man.”

During the shooting of an opening gala at the Holiday Inn, Scheider berated Szwarc in front of the crew and 200 extras, dismissing him as “a television director”. He sent memos to the studio accusing Szwarc of neglecting him, and wrote Szwarc a letter which stated: “Working for Jeannot Szwarc is knowing he will never say sorry or ever admitting [sic] he overlooked something. Well, enough of that shit for me!”

When he wasn’t shooting, Scheider focused on improving his tan, which presented another problem for the production. “Scheider was a fanatic sunbather,” says Gottlieb. “Every moment we were outdoors, he’d be there with a reflector and baby oil. It was his only pleasure. We were getting notes from the lab saying, ‘Can you put him in the shade? Because he’s getting darker and darker as the movie shoots.’” The star was repeatedly asked to desist his flagrant ray-catching. But, as Alves recalls, “He didn’t listen to anybody. He just ignored us.”

It was unsurprising, especially given the pressures of the shoot, that Scheider and his director would come to blows at that fateful meeting. After Verna Fields pulled the two men apart, Szwarc remembers them all melting into hysterical laughter. The tension, it seemed, was relieved. A pact was made to keep what had happened strictly between them. “Now this will give you an insight into Roy Scheider,” Szwarc fumes. “The next day I show up on the set and my camera operator goes, ‘Oh, here’s The Strangler!’ Roy told everybody! He said he let me throw him on the ground. That was what was important to him. I mean, don’t get me started…”

Even so, Szwarc admits, “after that it was fine. We started working together and I got good work from him. One night we were at the hotel and there was a prize fight on the television. Roy was sitting next to me at the bar and he leaned over and said, ‘I thought our fight was better than this one.’”

The battle to make Jaws 2 lasted for 10 months, taking in the shutdown and five weeks of post-production photography, which took place in early 1978. It wound up costing Universal $30 million — almost four times the cost of Jaws. “It was tough, it was a nightmare, and I think we were all happy to go home when it was finished,” says Szwarc. Yet, he insists, “most of my memories are good ones — well, except for dealing with Roy. We did it. Don’t ask me how we did it. It was unbelievable.”

While nobody — including its creators — would argue that Jaws 2 matched Spielberg’s original, the movie made $208 million worldwide, becoming the biggest sequel ever made — until Rocky II came along the next year.

“I think it’s a very good sequel,” says Szwarc. “It delivered. People liked it.” Gottlieb fondly remembers standing outside a theatre where it screened and seeing an excited child come out, run up to some friends standing in line for the next show and saying, “Oh man, Jaws ate a helicopter!”

“I said earlier there’s no honour in doing a sequel,” he adds. “But if you get it right, and I kind of think we did with Jaws 2, there’s no dishonour in it, either.”

As wild as it had been, the production hardly hurt its participants’ career prospects. A few years later, Gottlieb would return to script Jaws 3-D, which Alves would direct, while Gordon would go on to become a director himself, making acclaimed World War II movie A Midnight Clear in 1992, and more recently working on TV shows such as Better Call Saul and Fargo. “Jaws 2 was huge for me,” he says. “It was my film school.”

Szwarc, meanwhile, earned kudos for pulling it all off. While he would never match Spielberg’s post-shark-wrangling success, he returned to crowd-pleasing spectacle with Supergirl and Santa Claus: The Movie. When we speak, the 81-year-old has only just decided to retire after decades of TV work, and is in the midst of packing up his Beverly Hills home to return to his homeland of France.

As for Roy Scheider, who died in 2008, he arguably did better than any of them. After all, he never had to make another Jaws

SHARK’S TALE THE GREAT WHITE’S TIMELINE, POST- JAWS 2

1979 1941

Spielberg might have refused to do Jaws 2, but he was happy to go back in the water to spoof himself during the opening of his World War II comedy flop, when a skinny-dipping swimmer (Jaws victim Susan Backlinie) falls afoul of a Japanese submarine — all to the iconic John Williams theme.

1983 JAWS 3-D

Sadly, all of Joe Alves’ shark-based experience didn’t make the second Jaws sequel — to this day Alves’ sole directing credit — a success. The SeaWorld Orlando setting made the shoot more bearable, but a low budget and a penny-pinching producer (Alan Landsburg) meant there was little substance to match the 3D novelty.

1987

JAWS: THE REVENGE

The nadir of the franchise. In this deservedly ridiculed stinker, Lorraine Gary returned as Ellen Brody, for some reason stalked all the way to the Bahamas by a vengeful great white. After all, wrote critic Roger Ebert, “What shark wouldn’t want revenge against the survivors of the men who killed it?”

2006 Jaws Unleashed

Thirty years after the events of Jaws, another great white arrives in Amity… played by you

This oddly successful video game not only had a nonsensical title (the shark isn’t called Jaws and was never leashed to begin with), but was also glitchy as hell.

2015 Jaws 19

In the not-too-distant future of four years ago, Steven Spielberg’s son, Max, directed this holofilm sequel in which a shark attacks an underwater city, and which came with the tagline, “This time it’s Really Really Personal.”

(As seen in Back To The Future Part II.)

EDITED BY CHRIS HEWITT