His first film as a director is Rudo y Cursi, which stars Diego Luna and Gael García Bernal as two brothers in Mexico who end up fueding as they try to carve out a career in professional football.
I spoke with Carlos recently about the film and you can listen to the interview here:
Hardware is a 1990 sci-fi film set in a post-apocalyptic future.
The story involves the head of a killing cyborg found in the desert, which ends up repairing itself and wreaking havoc in the apartment of a sculptress.
Written and directed by Richard Stanley, it stars Dylan McDermott, Stacey Travis, John Lynch and William Hootkins.
A cult sci-fi horror, it hasn’t ever had a proper DVD release due to various rights difficulties until now.
I spoke with Richard Stanley in London recentlyand we discussed various aspects of the film including: where it was shot, how it got funded, the various influences and the long delay in securing a proper DVD release.
Telstar is a new British film about the life and career of record producer Joe Meek, the flamboyant songwriter and producer of ’60s hits as ‘Have I the Right?’, ‘Just Like Eddie, ‘Johnnie Remember Me’ and ‘Telstar‘.
Awaydays is now a film and the story, based on his Merseyside football-following youth, explores the relationship between two teenagers (Nicky Bell and Liam Boyle) in the late 1970s.
I recently spoke with Kevin in London about the film and you can listen to the interview here:
The story is about a glamorous American widow (Jessica Biel) who marries a young Englishman (Ben Barnes) in the South of France before going home to England to meet his parents (played by Colin Firth and Kristin Scott Thomas).
I spoke with Ben Barnes and Jessica Biel about the film just after it had played at the London Film Festival last October and you can listen to the interview here:
Shifty is a new British film about a young drug dealer (Riz Ahmed) in a town just outside London who sees his life spiral out of control when his best friend (Daniel Mays) returns home.
He made his solo directorial debut with Better Luck Tomorrow in 1997 and went on to direct films such as Annapolis (2006) and the third Fast and Furious film Tokyo Drift (2006).
I spoke with him in London recently about this latest Fast and Furious film and the how he went about shooting the car sequences.
Set in Sweden during the 1980s, it tells the story of a bullied 12-year-old boy named Oskar (Kåre Hedebrant) who develops a relationship with a vampire (Lina Leandersson).
It spans the period since the seventh election of Andreotti (plyed by Toni Servillo) as Prime Minister of Italy in 1992, until the trial in which he was accused of collusion with the Mafia.
It has been a favourite on the festival circuit in the past year and was nominated for the Palme D’Or at the Cannes Film Festival last May, where it was awarded the Prix du Jury.
The first is entitled 1974 and explores the paranoia, mistrust and institutionalised police corruption in Yorkshire.
When a young journalist named Eddie Dunford (Andrew Garfield) becomes obsessed with a police investigation into a series of child abductions, he uncovers a complex maze of lies and deceit.
One of the characters he comes across is a local businessman named John Dawson (played by Sean Bean) who, in this clip, advises Eddie to form a mutually beneficial relationship with him.
The second episode, directed by Marsh, set in and called 1980, sees the Yorkshire Ripper terrorise the area for six long years, and with the local police failing to make any progress, the Home Office sends in Manchester officer Peter Hunter (Considine) to review the investigation.
Having previously made enemies in the Yorkshire force while investigating a shooting incident in 1974, Hunter finds himself increasingly isolated when his version of events challenges their official line on the “Ripper”.
In the final instalment, directed by Tucker and set in and called 1983, another young girl has disappeared and Detective Chief Superintendent Maurice Jobson (Morrissey) recognises some alarming similarities to the abductions in 1974, forcing him to come to terms with the fact that he may have helped convict the wrong man.
When local solicitor John Piggott (Addy) is persuaded to fight this miscarriage of justice he finds himself slowly uncovering a catalogue of cover ups.
We looked at a 20 minute montage of sequences from the trilogy and spoke with Tony about adapting the books for the screen.
They start tonight (March 5th) on Channel 4 and could possibly have a cinema release around the world in the future (a la Sunday Bloody Sunday).
The questions in bold were asked by the bloggers, which included myself.
INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT
How do the 3 films tie together? [They are] 3 full length films and they work so that 1983 revisits 1974 and you see things from a slightly different perspective and then the middle one, 1980 is against the background of the Yorkshire Ripper but the characters roll all the way through the 3 of them.
The original idea of the novels, it’s basically fiction around a true event?
The novels where a quartet, 1974, 1977, 1980, 1983, and what David Peace talks about, he says it’s fiction torn out of the facts.
There are 4 books and 3 films. Was that your decision?
No, it started out that we’d make all four and I wrote all four, but filmmaking is capital intensive and we didn’t have enough money to do all four and we then had a choice.
We could have made all four but made them shorter and I’m so glad it didn’t go that way. These tales are not just about cops and robbers. Making them shorter would have forced us into a vagueness of narrative and you wouldn’t have had chance to have these incredible atmospheric moments that David Peace wrote in the books that we tried to mirror in the films.
It seemed to make more sense to make three. It was then a question of how do you do it? Do you take a couple to pieces and feed them into the others, but in the end I decided to just drop 1977 out cleanly.
This was for a number of reasons. One is that the others seemed to work really well as a trilogy and the other thing is it leaves 1977 untouched and I hope we can possibly go back and make that at some point.
Another thing I noticed from watching it was the films seem to be police vs journalists, then police vs police and then police vs people. Is that something you planned or was it in the original books?
This is an adaptation. I trusted those books and I trusted David’s writing and so I treated those as the truth. What was there I took and then had to turn it into a screenplay.
What happens in 1974 is that what you’ve got is very complex. You’re with a young journalist and it’s not quite journalists against cops. It’s a particular journalist. A young guy. He’s a typical film noir hero.
He’s libidinous, he’s lazy, he’s selfish, self obsessed young man. What happens with him, he starts off by just being out for himself, but then he’s got this thing in that he has to know what happened.
He wants to find the truth and so he goes further and further down that path and eventually he gets to a point where he needs to know the truth more than anything, more than his own safety or anything. He kind of changes as it goes along.
The second one is very much the police against their own. Peter Hunter (Paddy Considine) is on a Home Office investigation that he has to keep to keep to himself and he has to investigate corrupt police and as it said in that clip how deep does the rot go?
The third one is a two hander. You’ve got two main characters. You’ve got Morris Jobson, a policeman, who has gone along with corruption all the way through and has finally reached a point where he is going to do what he should have done a long time ago, like nine years before so it’s quite redemptive in many ways.
Then you’ve got John Piggot. I really like his character, he is wonderfully disgusting. He’s a damaged man. A lousy solicitor, but again, he wants to know what really happened. Although he doesn’t feel quite up to being a champion that is what he becomes.
The thing about David’s fiction and these films we made is that they are quite complex pieces. There isn’t good and bad. It is more like what it is like out there.
It’s all these different levels of good and bad. They are not comic book heroes. They are fractured people. They are a bit like you and me.
How do you think it will go down in the North?
Where are you drawing the line? (Laughter) I think West Yorkshire will enjoy it. As you can hear I’m not a Yorkshire man. Just to misquote David Peace again, he was Yorkshire born and bred although he wrote these in Tokyo.
He’s got a very complex relationship with that area but he believes, and I agree with him that particular crimes happen in particular places to particular people.
It’s for a reason and in the 70s and 80s Yorkshire was a hostile place. The UK was a pretty hostile place and he would say that that area in that period was hostile particularly to women.
That’s a Yorkshire man talking but I agree with him. I say that about Yorkshire but I could do that for London or anywhere else.
Do you think Life on Mars fans will get into it? Well it is the period, but there are a few more teeth in this one! I think one of the interesting things when I see lots of cuts of these is that I forget about the period. I follow the drama and I’m following the characters.
One of the exciting things for me is that you’ve got three full length films, three different directors, three different styles, so what are you following? You are following the characters and it is a real joy I’ve found to see how the characters change.
There is a young man called BJ who starts off as a silly little rent boy and who ends up a son of Yorkshire and a hero. That’s a beautiful path for him. So you follow these people and the way we structured the films was the way the novels were structured.
Your main character bows out but the more minor characters that you’ve got to know a little bit then come to the fore in the next one and so it is like baton passing.
I think that is why you are going to watch to find out what happens to these people and why things happen to them. I hope that is so interesting and so involving that you won’t look at how big the lapels are.
Did the directors have much to do with each other or did they look after their own thing?
The whole thing was very much a team effort right from the beginning in that everyone spoke to everyone else. You were always aware of two more of these films going on at the same time.
Having said that the idea was always that they should have the freedom to make the film they wanted to make. You have them on very different formats.
You have 1974 which is on 16mm. 1980 is shot on 35mm and 1983 shot digitally, but beautiful digital. They all have very different tones. They all feel different films and again what goes through though are those characters.
That’s what is leading you through and it is an interesting experience. Again, I think the more involved you become in the characters everything else falls back.
What was the hardest thing when you got the novels about changing them into a workable screenplay? What to leave out. The novels are so full and they are such full on experiments. David uses all kinds of different styles of writing.
You’ll feel like you are reading American detective fiction where all the action is pushed through on dialogue without any stage direction and then he’ll go to stream of consciousness where there is no punctuation for blocks of text.
It is very full on. I was spoilt. These novels were gifts. The other thing was, that was quite amazing, I was getting total freedom. I wasn’t having someone saying “Oh can you do all the outlines and treatments” and all that kind of stuff which when you do, makes you kind of bored and it’s like homework then. I just ploughed in.
Fortunately, because I got a main character leading the first one, a main character leading the second one and then two characters, what’s great is that you tell the story from their perspective so you only know what they know.
You cannot know anything outside and that gave me a really solid framework. That was like the sheet anchor that helped me stay on course. Then I just waded in and started writing a very long first draft of it that I then pared down. The main difficulty was that.
The other thing was the books are written where they ask more questions than are ever answered. Part of the darkness of the books is that some narrative strands kind of disappear off into the darkness and you can never know everything.
We employed a woman whose job it was to take those novels to pieces and she gave me cross referenced charts. We had to uncover all those strands so we knew what we were dealing with.
The screenplays had to be a little more tied down than the novels but I didn’t want to do it too much otherwise you destroy the feeling of them. That was pretty tricky.
There were lots of emails between me and David Peace in the lead up to me writing it and then he came over. We had a six hour meeting and I just grilled him, “Why did they do that? Why did that character go there?”
Of course this was all in David’s past so he had to start digging again, but he was really generous and always very helpful. If he knew the answers he’d tell me.
If he didn’t he’d try and find out and if it didn’t quite add up then we’d have conversations about what might be the story.
How happy where you with the cast as there are some big names in there? How could I not be happy with that cast? I was just knocked out by them.
Did you picture any of them when you were writing the screenplay? No. When I am writing they are just characters in my head, but when the casting starts to come together it adds another level to it. I don’t want to mention any particular names as they are all so good.
At what point where the directors brought in? Was that before you’d finished the scripts? They came in after we had locked off the scripts. They weren’t completely locked off because that would have been kind of daft. I started in early 2006.
By the beginning of 2007 we had three scripts. We went through about 2 or 3 drafts. Then the directors came in.
Having said that I met James Marsh at the Edinburgh Festival and we started talking. He became attached to these projects way before anyone was officially approached. He knew the material and because we were in touch he stuck his flag in 1980.
Most people will know David Peace from The Damned United becoming an unlikely bestseller. Was this all green lit before that success? Oh yeah. I wouldn’t say greenlit but I was working on it before Damned United.
How long where you on the project? 3 years. It started in early 2006 Andrew Eaton from Revolution Films made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. The thing is I knew Andrew because I’d worked with Michael Winterbottom on In This World.
That film about those 2 Afghanistan boys being smuggled and working on that film was one of the best filming experiences I’ve had.
The whole thing about Revolution Films is that if they make that call you know it is going to be a challenge. The chances are you are going to be asked to do something you don’t think you can really do or you are scared of doing. Go to Afghanistan. Adapt 4 novels into films inside a year and a half.
Are these 3 films going to be released in cinemas around the World? There are plans. Things are being looked into. I’d be really interested to see how the States take them. I think they could really do well in the States.
They’ve got a feel to them. They owe a lot to film noir and American detective movies of the 40s and 50s.
It reminded me a lot of Zodiac. The density of it. Yeah. I agree. It will be very interesting to see how it does.
What are you going to be doing next? I’ve just finished worked on an extraordinary film that is a First Film directed by Sam Mortimer in Nottingham that concerns a little girl who is in care. That was quite an experience.
We wrapped that film just before Christmas. Also last year I directed a film I wrote. It was a 20 minute short which is set in the Kurdish community in North London where I live and so right now I’m writing the feature version of that called Kingsland.
I’m helping Terry Gilliam put Don Quixote back in the saddle.
What are they going to do with the film that never was (as seen in Lost in La Mancha)? There was only 5 days shooting.
Is it really looking like a go this time? Absolutely. 100% (Laughs)
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Thanks to Murray Cox and the Channel 4 press office for their help in arranging this.
Red Riding starts tonight at 9pm and can also be seen on 40D.
He initially worked as an animator at Disney in the late 70s before going on to join the computer animation division of Lucasfilm‘s Industrial Light and Magic.
In 1986 the department was purchased by Apple founder Steve Jobs who renamed the new company Pixar (a fake Spanish word meaning ‘to make pixels’) and gave Lasseter the freedom to direct, produce and create models for a variety of projects, many of which were television commercials.
In the late 1980s Lasseter made several award winning shorts before going on to direct the groundbreaking Toy Story in 1995, the first feature-length computer animated film.
As the chief of Pixar’s creative department, Lasseter became the key figure behind an extraordinary run of critically acclaimed, blockbuster animated films.
The first movie he has overseen for Disney is Bolt, the tale of a small white dog who, having spent his entire life acting in a TV series, thinks that he has super powers.
Directed by Chris Williams and Byron Howard, it was produced by Lasseter and I spoke to him in London recently about his career and the new film.
Robyn Hitchcock is one of England’s most enduring contemporary singer/songwriters who also appears in the film as part of the wedding band.
He has collaborated with Demme before on the 1998 concert film Storefront Hitchcock and released many acclaimed albums throughout a distinguished career.
I spoke with him recently in London about Rachel Getting Married:
He is also in his latest film Somers Town, which follows two teenage boys Tomo (Thomas Turgoose) and Marek (Piotr Jagiello), who develop an unlikely friendship after meeting by chance in an area of North London.
I spoke to him on the phone recently about the film and other roles in his career.
The Wrestler is a new film about an ageing wrestler – Randy ‘The Ram’ Robinson (Mickey Rourke) – past his prime, who struggles to make ends meet doing shows on the weekends in New Jersey.
The story follows him as he works in a deli, strikes up a relationship with a stripper named Cassidy (Marisa Tomei) and seeks a reconciliation with his estranged daughter (Evan Rachel Wood).
Paul Rudd (right) and Seann William Scott (left) are the two stars of Role Models – a new movie in which they play two guys working for an energy drink company forced to do community service for a charity after breaking the law.
I spoke with Danny in London recently about the film and we discussed: the story, filming in Mumbai, using digital cameras, the Indian actors he worked with and the interesting backstory of how the film got financed and released.
The Reader is the film adaptation of the 1995 German novel by Bernhard Schlink that follows a complicated love affair in the 1950s between a German teenager named Michael Berg (David Kross) and a woman twice his age called Hannah Schmitz (Kate Winslet).
Years later as a law student he discovers a terrible secret about his former lover and struggles to deal with the repercussions of her actions in World War II.
The book became a bestseller that was translated into 37 languages and the film is directed by Stephen Daldry with Ralph Fiennes playing Michael Berg as an older man.
I recently spoke to both of them in London about their work on the film and you can listen to the interviews here:
Danny Wallace is the author of Yes Man, a 2005 book that explored what happened when an old man from the Aldgate area in London encouraged him to say yes to more things in life.
It is now a film starring Jim Carrey and Zooey Deschanel and I recently spoke to Danny about inspiration for the book and its journey to the big screen.
I’ve known Danny since 1999, when we both worked on the Ian Collins show on Talk Radio (now TalkSPORT) and – coincidentally – this interview took place in a studio on the very same street where we first met in a pub called The Marquis of Granby.
You also can download this interview as a podcast via iTunes by clicking here
Twilight is out in UK cinemas on Friday 19th December
UPDATE 14/07/12: Twilight became a huge hit and made enormous stars of its cast. It also took my site down as thousands of people tried to download it.
This version stars Keanu Reeves as the alien (named Klaatu), who is assessed by team of scientists (played by Jennifer Connelly, Jon Hamm and John Cleese) who must convince him that the human race is worth saving.
I recently spoke to the director Scott Derrickson about updating a sci-fi classic for the present day.
Lakeview Terraceis a contemporary drama set in LA about a young couple (played by Patrick Wilson and Kerry Washington) who move in to an upmarket neighbourhood next to a sinister police officer (Samuel L Jackson) who begins to make their life very difficult.
Directed by Neil LaBute, it explores some of the uncomfortable prejudices beneath contemporary US society.
Año Uña is a new film directed by Jonás Cuarón about a Mexican teenager and an older American woman who meet one summer in Mexico.
Unusually, it was edited entirely from photographic stills and was made without a script or set.
I recently spoke to Jonás and his father Alfonso Cuarón, who served as an exec producer and is a noted director in his own right having made such films as Children of Men and Y Tu Mama Tambien.
We talked about this movie, the business of making films on a smaller scale, new distribution models for movies on the web and the wider future of cinema in general.
In recent years Fernando has directed such acclaimed films as City of God (2002) and The Constant Gardener (2005) and I recently spoke to him in London about this latest film.
Directed by Ari Folman, it examines his experiences in the army and struggle to remember what happened as he interviews fellow soldiers from the time.
The strange title is taken from a scene with one of Folman’s interviewees remembers taking a machine gun and dancing an ‘insane waltz’ amid enemy fire, with posters of Bashir Gemayel lining the walls behind him.
Gemayel was the Lebanese president who whose assassination helped trigger the massacre.
The most unusual and startling aspect of the film is that it is animated, an unconventional approach for what is essentially a documentary.
I recently spoke with Ari in London about the film and you can listen to the interview here:
More recently he wrote Downfall, a stark examination of the final days of Hitler and The Third Reich and his latest film deals with another dark chapter of German history.
Although he only appears in one scene, it is an extraordinary unbroken sequence in which plays a priest who questions Sands about the wisdom of his actions.