How the Superheroes Saved the Stars

It’s clear that Edward Norton decided to make the most of The Incredible Hulk. An acclaimed character actor who won an Oscar nomination on only his second film - 1997’s Primal Fear - his casting in Universal’s second stab at the Hulk franchise was a surprise to many. Not so surprising is that he effectively became a co-writer on the project, keen to explore Bruce Banner’s inner psyche and probe the complexities of the monster within. Unfortunately his efforts reportedly caused clashes with both director Louis Leterrier and a disgruntled studio, and the sole screenwriting credit ended up with Zak Penn.

The reality is that Norton needs The Incredible Hulk, just as the franchise certainly benefits from his thespian talents. Despite Norton’s early success, his standout part in David Fincher’s generation-defining Fight Club is nearly ten years old already, and a handful of gems aside - Rounders, 25th Hour, Down in the Valley - his subsequent CV has steered him ever closer towards the obscure. His projects haven’t found the audiences to match their quality, and his collaboration with Marvel signals a commitment to broaden his appeal.

Norton’s efforts to reclaim the mainstream echo the other Marvel release of the year. Jon Favreau’s Iron Man is an origins story that made the daring move of casting Robert Downey Jr as weapons engineer and metal-clad superhero Tony Stark. Production executives looked beyond the actor’s extensive list of high-profile drug misdemeanours collected over the past decade or so, and focused instead on his undeniable acting talent. He certainly delivers the goods, elevating the film above the mediocrity it would have suffered without his particular brand of breezy charisma. The actor fought for the role, and it’s not surprising given the career rebirth it has undoubtedly delivered with the film’s stunning success.

With perhaps the unfortunate exception of Eric Bana, the superheroes have generally been kind on their stars, acting as a launch-pad to new opportunities and a wealth of choice, courtesy of an expansive and eternally enthusiastic fan-base. In the same year that Norton won Academy recognition for Primal Fear, George Clooney became Bruce Wayne in Joel Schumacher’s Batman & Robin. The film would become a doomed addition to the DC franchise, with Clooney spectacularly miscast, but although rightly remembered with derision, the mere presence of ER’s Dr Doug did wonders for his career. He went from awkward caped crusader to bedding Jennifer Lopez as stylish petty thief Jack Foley in Steven Soderbergh’s impressive crime drama Out of Sight, although he was perhaps lucky to win the role before Batman & Robin opened. He may have apologised to fans for such a mauling of the Batman legend, but as a means to an end he’s hardly complaining.

Contemporary superheroes have come to be dominated by thespians since Tobey Maguire gave Spider-Man some credibility and cult favourite Sam Raimi agreed to direct the cinematic juggernaut. Despite his youth, Maguire’s CV was already peppered with thespian projects, from Ang Lee’s The Ice Storm, through The Cider House Rules to Wonder Boys. All popular with the Academy, but largely unseen by Spider-Man’s core audience. His casting opened up the character’s appeal and introduced Maguire to the popcorn crowd. Comic-book rival DC has since responded by casting a former American psycho as Batman. Christian Bale has defined himself as an actor willing to go to extraordinary physical lengths in pursuit of character, something which suits both director Christopher Nolan and the darker political times that the franchise now aspires to address.

The calibre of talent shaping big-screen superheroes is perhaps finally doing justice to the frequently overlooked standard of writing evident in the Marvel and DC universes. Comics have never really escaped their stereotypical, snotty-teenager image, despite addressing such themes as alienation and adolescent confusion with undeniable insight. Whereas the big-screen versions may rely on thespian credibility to reach audiences beyond the fan-boys as the standard of writing sinks between the comic and the screen, it’s a two-way relationship that won’t run out of steam anytime soon.

(Thsi article was first published on Future Movies in June 2008)

Casey Affleck on Gone Baby Gone: Bit-Part Player to Leading Man

“I didn’t want it to feel like he could’ve gotten someone better,” Casey Affleck says simply, as he recalls pondering whether to take the lead in his brother Ben’s directorial debut, Gone Baby Gone. He adds: “He probably could’ve got someone better, and I think he tried!”

Affleck has lost his voice, leaving his tones even raspier than normal. He’s casually dressed in T-shirt, jeans and trainers, and frequently pauses long and hard to find the words he’s looking for, let alone the ability to say them in his current state. Still, at least he has a work to be proud of. He eventually agreed to play Patrick Kenzie, a Boston PI who, along with his girlfriend and PI partner Angie Gennaro (Michelle Monaghan), is hired by the family of abducted four year-old Amanda McCready, when the police investigation draws a blank. The pair find themselves up against corrupt cops, child abuse, surprising moral questions and the murky world of Boston’s criminal fraternity, as they delve deeper into the child’s disappearance.

Ben has surprised many critics by directing and co-writing an impressive adaptation of Dennis Lehane’s novel, although its British release was delayed six months as a gesture of sensitivity to the ongoing Madeleine McCann case. “There’s always similarities to something, and there’ll be a family out there that’s dealing with a tragedy like that the weekend this movie comes out,” Casey sighs, although he adds that he believes the UK release delay was the right thing to do: “If there’s the tiniest chance that it might interfere in any way with the real investigation, then there’s no question.”

When asked about how he thought his work relationship would be with his brother, Casey responds with characteristic nonchalance. “I wasn’t trying to ensure… I wasn’t anticipating… a very friendly relationship on-set. I mean, when you’re trying to make a movie together, and if you both care about it, then you’ve gotta be passionate - if you’re gonna disagree, then butt heads and work it out. Why I’m so comfortable about Ben is that I knew he and I could fight comfortably, you know? We could fight and say exactly what we want, which was great if for no other reason than we save time.” He pauses for a moment, before adding: “He was always very open to me doing things… I mean, sometimes he’d be frustrated because, um…” He smiles to himself, as though concerned he’s being too candid, before laughing: “Next question!”

Ben and co-screenwriter Aaron Stockard (a childhood friend of the Afflecks) took Kenzie’s age down from 40 to 30, both to accommodate Casey’s youthful appearance and to leave scope for a more dramatic character arc. “If you had a 40 year-old private investigator, he’s presumably been working for some time,” Casey explains: “He’s probably used his gun before, he’s probably seen a dead body before, he’s probably been exposed to a lot of the moral, grey areas of his job… Making him younger means that all these things are happening for the first time and so have more of an impact on him, along with decisions that are harder to wrestle with.”

The film has drawn praise for an unflinching study of the ‘real’ Boston, one of which the Afflecks have firsthand experience, although Casey is bemused by many critics who have reacted with shock at such an unsanitised dose of social reality. “I think, you know, the faces look real, and Ben seems to really love the city and wanted to photograph the people who live there and wanted to photograph the streets where we grew up, and I don’t think it’s that harsh; it seems pretty fair,” he shrugs, adding: “Every city has corrupt police officers and crack-heads, and children are abducted everywhere across the world, so I’m not sure I see what’s so awful about it.”

The film marks Casey’s graduation from a decade of supporting roles in some 20 films (some, he admits, “phenomenally awful”), to leading man, although he’s riding a wave of critical acclaim for his portrayal of the vilified killer Robert Ford in Andrew Dominik’s stunning western The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. “Well…” he begins. He pauses for several seconds before conceding: “I guess I’d be lying if I said it didn’t feel nice!”

The critical success is leading towards greater choice for the 33 year-old, although his apparent physical pigeonholing has been demoralising in the past: “Very often the character description, which is usually on the first page [of the script], is something like, you know… ‘Joe Smith, early 30s… Attractive, but not so you’d notice’!”

All that should be about to change for Affleck the younger.

(This article was first published on Future Movies in June 2008)

[REC]: The Future of Horror Looks Shaky

It would seem that shaky cameras are cool. The release of Spanish horror [REC] is the latest in a series of horror films shot on a digital camera from the perspective of stressed-out operators who are themselves a character in the story. [REC] presents the ‘footage’ captured by a late-night news reporter and her cameraman as they follow a team of Barcelona firefighters on a routine call to a seemingly innocuous apartment block. A gruesome encounter with an apparently demented old woman quickly escalates out of control, and suddenly the lives of everyone in the apartment block are under threat. With the news team present, all the action is caught on camera, the images becoming increasingly wild and frenetic as the situation worsens.

The digital format is certainly highly suited to the horror genre, with low production-costs and increasing technical flexibility proving especially advantageous for independent filmmakers. Still, mainstream cinema has taken nearly a decade to catch up with the box-office phenomenon that was The Blair Witch Project. Meanwhile, words like ‘gritty’ and ‘real’ are bandied about in the press as critics and paying audiences alike respond to the stylish digital aesthetic. Where younger viewers hail the future of filmmaking, and in particular the horror genre, older critics grumble at the motion-sickness-inducing visuals and the lack of anything resembling a good old-fashioned tracking or Steadicam shot.

Whereas the Blair Witch style arose as much from necessity as from inspired editing on the part of the filmmakers, it seems that replicating the shaky-cam look on a mainstream studio production, where traditional techniques and equipment are well-practiced and readily available, can be just as tricky. It was the handheld, amateur style that provided the hook for the recent Cloverfield. Otherwise merely a bog-standard monster movie, director (and pal of Lost co-creator JJ Abrams) Matt Reeves decided to appeal directly to the YouTube generation by shooting the entire $30m film in a shaky-cam aesthetic, notably against the advice of his production team who didn’t relish the challenge of having to look like they didn’t know what they were doing. Reeves achieved the look by getting his actors to shoot some of the footage themselves, and, indeed, becoming a cameraman himself; “I qualified for the job by being, well…not qualified!” he told reporters on the press-circuit. Being a studio piece, however, the trick was also in ensuring his crack team of professional camera operators adopted an amateur style while still capturing the right shots necessary for both maintaining suspense and driving the story. The result is a riotous piece of filmmaking which, while failing to live up to much of the hype, shows the studios are finally paying attention to the massive cultural influence of multimedia viewing platforms, of which YouTube is the most recognised.

Digital shaky-cam filmmaking is seen by many as directly relevant to the everyday lives of the cinema-going public, a fact which big-budget Hollywood will doubtless be looking to on a larger scale now that Cloverfield has paid off handsomely at the international box-office (a sequel is already in the works). Matt Reeves has stated that his film was “made for an audience that does this daily,” as he refers to the quantity of online material depicting ordinary people simply filming their daily lives. With the lingering spectre of terrorism still very much at the forefront of people’s minds, converging the reality of modern media saturation with times of crisis has been a topical theme since images of the World Trade Center collapse were beamed to a live global audience. Cloverfield is at its best and most poignant early on when panic sets in across New York in scenes deeply reminiscent of amateur footage filmed on 9/11, while [REC] and George Romero’s own Diary of the Dead, an addition to his original zombie saga (and follow-up to Land of the Dead) seen through the eyes of a group of film students, explore the now-common theme of infection and viral threat. With the tragedy of 9/11 in New York, the fallout of 7/7 in London, and then the Asian tsunami and Hurricane Katrina documented by both amateurs and professionals alike to be saturated across television and the Internet, firsthand experiences of a world in chaos are accessible at the touch of a button. Replicating this chaos in fiction filmmaking is therefore fertile filmmaking territory that suits the digital format and is a gift to the horror genre.

This isn’t to say that the character-as-camera-operator is limited to horror. Brian De Palma’s recent Iraq dram Redacted, addresses the media-saturated world head-on. Exploring the lives of a platoon of US soldiers on checkpoint duty in a provincial Iraqi town, the story unfolds primarily through the eyes of a young GI who films his experiences in preparation for a planned film-school application on his return home. The film uses this character facet to iron out the familiar shaky-cam aesthetic (the soldier has raw talent as a filmmaker, after all, so he knows how to use a camera), focusing on the content of the soldier’s point-of-view rather than the style in which he shoots it. De Palma also uses streamed Internet video footage, CCTV and even pinhole cameras to develop the story, in a marked difference from the frenetic style that increasingly characterizes the horror genre.

The problem comes when repetition kicks in. Although still a solid horror, [REC] suffers from a lack of originality, a frenetic zombie film following hot on the heels of both Diary of the Dead and The Zombie Diaries, all of which linger in the shadow of 28 Days Later… The question remains as to whether the horror genre can evolve beyond the simple shaky-cam aesthetic, or whether multiplexes will be cursed with a continuous slew of cheap knock-offs. With Cloverfield arguably Blair Witch with a visual-effects budget and a more conventional visual pay-off, it could be that the next true innovation will be left to the shoestring creativity of the independents.

(This article was first published on Close-Up Film. Click here for a full review of [REC])

"Sly's seen it... Lovely to get his blessing!" Garth Jennings and cast discuss Son of Rambow

Mild motion-sickness isn’t perhaps the first thing you expect to feel in north London’s Holborn Studios. That’s until you realize that much of the office-space is actually located on converted barges, with a gently bobbing quay providing a walkway onto the snappily-named Eagle Wharf. This is the base of production company Hammer & Tongs, founded by director Garth Jennings and his producing partner Nick Goldsmith. Here Jennings awaits the press to discuss his second feature, Son of Rambow, along with his young stars Will Poulter and Bill Milner, and co-star Jessica Hynes (nee Stevenson). All are in good humour, as you’d expect given that the film has proved a hit on the festival circuit, and its long-awaited UK release is only a few weeks away.

Set in 1982, Jennings’ film tells the story of two ten-year-olds - the quiet and sheltered Will Proudfoot (Milner), and school troublemaker Lee Carter (Poulter) - whose discovery of Stallone’s classic action-thriller First Blood inspires them to shoot their own action-packed sequel. Jennings, dressed in casual jeans and T-shirt, reckons that his young stars are largely responsible for the film charming festival audiences and critics alike. “I think if people like the film, it’s normally because they like these two,” he smiles, “You know, you can do all the best writing and all that stuff in the world, but actually it’s very hard to find people of their age with that kind of confidence.” Lucky, then, that the boys showed up when they did, as the production team was coming to the end of a fruitless five-month casting period. “We had to sort of stop casting and start moving on with pre-production, and they were both - even though they’re in the room, I would say this anyway - exactly right for the parts,” says Jennings, adding, “It was one of those instant, easy-peasy decisions.”

While the boys snap up most of the attention, Hynes plays Mary, Will’s mother. As the Proudfoots are part of the strict Brethren religion, Mary has imposed a blanket ban on television and films, making Will’s accidental exposure to First Blood all the more potent. Hynes, perhaps still best known for cult TV favourite Spaced, which she co-wrote and starred in with Simon Pegg, describes her rare, non-comedic role in Son of Rambow as “a one-off”, adding, “To play a straight role in a film like this is a gift, I mean it’s a sort of career highlight, really.” Her enthusiasm for the role even extended to the costume, despite the Brethren’s conservative tastes: “I loved it!” she laughs, “It’s like Little House on the Prairie, with the button-up shirt.”

Jennings drew inspiration from his own childhood in writing the screenplay. “This was phenomenal!” he exclaims as he recalls his own discovery of the original Rambo. “We were playing in the forest everyday, and then here’s this guy with a knife and a stick who takes on two-hundred guys – he only kills one of them, and that’s by throwing a rock…” Even, however, after the success of his debut feature, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Jennings found the £3.5 million production-budget was still far from easy to secure for Son of Rambow, as it didn’t seem to track with industry expectations. “We weren’t making another loony space movie, or something with a robot,” he sighs, “No, seriously, people were saying, ‘Nice… but have you got anything with robots, or some puppets? Puppets would be great.’”

With the budget eventually secured, taking a step back in terms of production size was a relief for Jennings, who, having come from a background in music video production through Hammer & Tongs, found the big-budget studio experience to be sometimes cumbersome on Hitchhiker’s. “We [had] got to do it exactly as we wanted to, but we suddenly inherited all this studio stuff,” he explains, “We had a load of people, it means you’re a lot slower, it’s harder to get what you want, just the numbers… So it was rather nice to do Son of Rambow and go, right, you really don’t need all that stuff.” Cutting back on the studio fat meant Jennings could also pay more attention to his stars. Hynes describes how the production’s small scale helped preserve its charm: “They’ve solved problems with the film within their own sort of creative team, which has meant that it’s kept its heart.” As Jennings banters back and forth with Milner and Coulter in the Holborn Studios barge, they offer a glimpse of how much fun the shoot must’ve been. “It was an amazing thing for a director to have people who just, I mean when you say ‘Can you be dragged a hundred feet along the floor really fast by the kite there?’ (imitates the boys) ‘Yeah, cool,’” Jennings gushes.

The boys weren’t allowed to do their own stunt-work (“if something happened, that would be the end of everything,” Jennings grimaces), although Milner admits to a boyish rivalry with his co-star: “During filming we had like an ongoing competition who could do the most stunts, but they were always a bit petit!” Milner remains the only one of the two to have seen the original First Blood, strictly for research purposes of course. “It did help me, kind of, play my character a bit more,” he offers, thoughtfully. It turns out that Milner’s more into Spider-Man (“He’s a dangerous lad! And he goes to school! He’s doing his GCSEs, and he’s fighting crime at the same time!”), while Coulter’s cinematic inspiration is Ethan Hunt: “I remember when I was about ten years old coming out of Mission: Impossible and being generally convinced that I was a secret agent!”

Son of Rambow was originally scheduled for release last summer, but legal problems restricted it to the festival circuit instead. Jennings and Goldsmith had gone into production not knowing who owned the rights to First Blood (Son of Rambow uses clips of Stallone, and, of course, the correctly-spelt name), but discovered afterwards that, in Jennings’ words, “people own different parts of Rambo”, which complicated things. Jennings describes the production mentality, with a wide smile: “[We thought] we’ll just make it, and it’ll be good, and then they’ll see it and go, oh alright, and, er… that was unbelievably naïve.” Luckily, the legal issues have all now been sorted, and the film even has the seal of approval from Rambo himself, to Jennings’ obvious delight: “Sly’s seen it, and he gave me a very, very nice review, yes, he was very sweet. Lovely to get his blessing.” Lets hope Son of Rambow gets the box-office reception it so richly deserves.

(This article was first published on Future Movies)

Box-Office Blood: Michael Haneke Re-Boots Funny Games

The scene takes place in an East Coast lake-house. Ann is an affluent middleclass mother, and right now she is fast approaching the limits of emotional endurance. Tormented, along with her husband and young son, by two well-spoken young sociopaths, Ann is battered, bruised and emotionally wrecked. “Why don’t you just kill us?” she asks one of her tormentors. “You shouldn’t forget the importance of entertainment,” comes the cruelly jovial response. Although potentially ripped from a tabloid headline, this single line of dialogue sums up the tone of Michael Haneke’s Funny Games U.S., a shot-for-shot English-language remake of his own 1997 Austrian domestic drama Funny Games. With moments of gut-wrenching horror mixed with spikes of jet-black humour, Haneke tells a sadistic tale that explores the media’s relationship with violence, and how that relationship impacts on viewers both young and old. For youths Paul and Peter (Michael Pitt and Brady Corbet, respectively), violence is a game without consequences, bouts of torture arranged between a bit of TV and a sandwich. When things don’t go their way, they literally ‘rewind’ the action and replay the scene with the necessary adjustments made; “Where’s the fucking remote!” Paul cries as their victims briefly gain the upper hand. It’s a surreal moment, but nonetheless incisively taps into their states of mind.

Haneke counters the largely-unseen violence of Funny Games U.S. with dark humour, as though poking fun at the false reality of the films and television that have clearly inspired his two young sociopaths. Paul and Peter often raise a wry, if uncomfortable, smile when they discuss their motivation, gleefully plundering all the usual clichés (bullying, dismissive, divorced parents, um, incest…), while Paul’s occasional comments directly to the camera underscore the film’s voyeuristic elements (“You’re on their side, right?” he asks us). In contrast, events seen from the victims’ perspective are far more sobering, drawing attention to the emotional realities of personal crisis. Haneke lingers on Tim Roth’s George, nursing a painful injury while trying to dry a soaked mobile phone battery with a hair-dryer in order to contact the police; hardly thrilling stuff but painfully real. Swinging from the pathetic and helpless to the emotionally-crippling, Haneke also presents an audacious scene where he keeps the camera rolling for several minutes in the aftermath of a moment of particularly devastating violence in the couple’s living-room. Once again spared the act itself, the audience must drink in the consequences, as the surviving characters first orient themselves, and then react to the emotional impact. The result is heart-thumping, if utterly draining, cinema.

Whereas Haneke debates and criticizes the media’s relationship with violence, big-budget Hollywood seems to be responding to uncertain times by backtracking when it comes to violent content. Perhaps the highest profile example of the past year is Die Hard 4.0, aka Live Free or Die Hard, to use its self-conscious post-9/11 US title. The original Die Hard became one of the definitive action movie of the 1980s (and, arguably, beyond), presenting a bloody, violent and coarse thriller. It was targeted at a young adult audience in a market dominated by machismo and Schwarzenegger, in a wider Reaganite culture of Cold War militarization. In short, violence was cool. By the time the third sequel showed up last year, the franchise was targeted squarely at the teenage market. The hard-smoking, hard-talking John McClane neither smoked nor swore, and was even given a teenage sidekick in the form of TV-star Justin Long. The plot was also self-consciously teen-oriented, involving a disgruntled techie naughtily hacking into a US Government mainframe, and thus tacking a web-related ‘Point Zero’ onto the film’s European title.

As an action movie with plenty of explosions but little actual blood, Die Hard 4.0 demonstrates the reluctance of the studios to rely on the young-adult audiences that have proved so profitable in the past. This is perhaps why the relatively low-budget torture-porn horror of the past few years, such as the hugely profitable Saw franchise and Eli Roth’s Hostel films, have been rewarded with such enormous box-office. They provide the adult alternative to the increasingly sanitised content of contemporary big-budget thrillers, most of which are rated 12A in Britain as they target the teen market in a bid to increase their chances of taking back ever-ballooning production costs. As a result violent content is toned down, although the sanitised nature of some cinematic offerings is often controversial in a different way, as with Die Hard 4.0.

In sharp contrast to the modern cinematic trend, Rambo, the third sequel to the often under-rated 1982 thriller First Blood, clings to its 80s roots with considerable gusto, much to the consternation of many US critics. Sylvester Stallone co-writes, directs, stars and perhaps even made the tea on the project that attempts to revitalize the second iconic character of his career. He was clearly less interested in playing it safe in the current climate than he was in consolidating his mark on cinematic history with more of the same. He delivers a Burmese-set gore fest that has certainly succeeded in turning heads. Presenting the thinnest of plots involving western missionaries in need of rescue from the tyrannical Burmese military, the trim screenplay hinges upon staggeringly bloody action set-pieces, providing gleefully gruesome answers for anyone who wondered what effect a piece of heavy artillery will have on a human body at point-blank range. The resulting film was surely saved from a straight-to-DVD release only by industry goodwill for Stallone’s name and the franchise’s dubious genre pedigree. Nevertheless, it seems unlikely that Rambo represents a significant turning-point in the action genre, with the film seen more as a likely swansong to Stallone’s see-sawing career than any kind of industry barometer.

The thorny subject of movie violence can be detected lingering in the background of almost every headline-grabbing tragedy, from Jamie Bulger through to Columbine and, more recently, the tragedy at Virginia Tech. Combined with the post-9/11 cultural sensitivity, it’s perhaps unsurprising that the major studios are avoiding big-budget gore-fests. Still, with the next generation of video-games at times attracting even more attention than the latest installment of the Saw franchise, the question of how individuals respond to on-screen violence, and the reality of violent acts, looks to remain eternally relevant, even if sly explorations of the subject from the likes of Michael Haneke, seem few and far between.

(Funny Games U.S. is released in the UK on 4th April. This article was first published on Future Movies)

Juno: Diablo Cody and Jason Reitman in Interview

“I have a sick, sick tendency to find comedy in crisis,” admits Diablo Cody. She and director Jason Thank You For Smoking Reitman are in a jovial mood as they greet journalists in the depths of London’s Soho Hotel. It’s a cold October afternoon, and Juno will be making its UK debut in the next few days at the 51st London Film Festival. Only three months later the film will have taken an astounding $100m at the US box-office (from a budget of less than $10m) and secured no fewer than four Oscar nominations, but for the moment it remains a below-the-radar indie that’s testing well and generating positive buzz.

It all kicked off with a blog called Pussy Ranch, written daily by former stripper Diablo Cody (aka: Brook Busey-Hunt). For six months, producer Mason Novick read each new entry and laughed, before finally deciding it was time to drop her a line and ask her whether she’d ever tried writing a screenplay. Cody admits she was initially wary. “I’m just a pragmatic mid-Westerner. Writing movies is not something that we do,” she says, adding, “I didn’t really listen to him right off the bat, I kinda blew him off for a while, and then finally he got to me, and so I started writing Juno.” The resulting screenplay tells the story of pregnant and quick-witted teen Juno MacGuff. Deciding to give up her unborn baby for adoption, the story follows the impact of her decision upon the nervous father-to-be, her family, the couple who will adopt, and of course Juno herself. The screenplay landed on Reitman’s desk, who found he was hooked by the second page: “I thought, ‘Wow, this girl’s got a great voice’,” he says, “and by about halfway through I just thought, ‘if I don’t direct this, I’m gonna regret it for the rest of my life’.”

It comes as no real surprise that Cody draws Juno from her own adolescence (“I consider the character autobiographical in a sense” she says). As a result, she was frequently on-set to make any changes or adaptations that Reitman deemed necessary. “It’s her voice, at the end of the day,” states Reitman. It’s 20 year-old Ellen Page who breathes deadpan life into Cody’s creation. Reitman had, like most people, been mightily impressed with her performance in the controversy-baiting Hard Candy, and from their first meeting her role in the film proved a no-brainer. Page effortlessly nails Cody’s tone, and has been rewarded with an Oscar nomination for her troubles.

Part of the film’s appeal is the comedic tone, the “comedy-in-crisis” set-up that seems to be Cody’s natural setting as a writer, and which has undoubtedly been a major factor in the film’s stunning success. Teen-pregnancy doesn’t perhaps make for the most obvious comedy material, but Cody’s writing generates a distinctly liberating feel that manages to explore serious social themes while keeping the tone light and fluffy. “I always saw comedic potential in the idea of this unplanned pregnancy,” Cody confirms, “I know people think that’s kinda weird.” But it’s a tone that plays to Reitman’s strengths: “I actually think you can deal with more issues in comedy than you can in drama,” he says, “For some reason in a comedy, soon as you get people laughing, you’re able to say things you otherwise were not able to say… Had [Diablo] done this as a drama, it would’ve perhaps just been melodramatic.”

Although the story hinges around Juno’s pregnancy, Reitman believes that wider themes are in fact more prevalent: “What I think Diablo really approached, in a very sophisticated way on this film, more than teenage pregnancy, is the changing idea of what a modern family is.” In making his point, he draws attention to Juno’s stepmother Bren (played by former West Winger Allison Janney), who is sympathetic to her stepdaughter’s plight from the start, and Vanessa and Mark Loring (Jennifer Garner and Jason Bateman), the increasingly estranged couple who Juno decides will make suitable adoptive parents for her baby. Reitman also points out that all the main characters, at some point in the film, “decide to grow up.” As he surmises, “That’s, I think, what makes it infinitely relatable.”

The Stateside success of Juno has certainly confirmed that cinema audiences have connected with Cody’s story en masse. Cody herself has become hot Hollywood property, and has already been courted by Spielberg for TV show The United States of Tara. Arguably, not since Charlie Kaufman delivered his quirky screenplay for Being John Malkovich in 1999, has a writer been thrust into the spotlight so quickly. With Cody’s cannibal horror Jennifer’s Body already in preproduction, she’s certainly a talent to watch out for.

This article was first published on The Smell of Napalm

Cloverfield: Director Matt Reeves Discusses A Beast For Our Time

“I mean, a giant monster’s absurd, but you have to find ways to make it real.” Director Matt Reeves smiles as he recalls the moment when childhood friend and Lost co-creator JJ Abrams approached him with an idea for a modern, thoroughly American monster movie, inspired by the enduring Japanese cultural resonance of Godzilla. Reeves was understandably cautious, as would anyone who had never directed a feature before, much less a feature that was so effects-heavy, calling for the wholesale destruction of New York City at the hands of a 350-foot beast. But Reeves soon found a hook that compelled him to commit to the challenge. “I think what’s different about the movie is really the point-of-view,” he explains, adding that the production mentality became to “try and find the way this would be shot if the person finding the camera was going through the experience.”

Taking inspiration from the personalised home-movie style so abundant on YouTube, along with sources such as Deborah Scranton’s The War Tapes, a war documentary shot by National Guard troops serving in Iraq, Reeves decided that all the action would be filmed from a single viewpoint, with a character simply picking up the camera and shooting the experience. “This movie is very much made for an audience that does this daily,” Reeves says. The resulting story centres on a group of twenty-somethings whose party is interrupted by an apparent earthquake and then an explosion in downtown Manhattan. Given the task of filming the party, the amiable Hud (TJ Miller) ends up documenting his friends and the resulting chaos as the city comes under attack. Cloverfield marks the first time this style of shooting has found its way into a big-budget production, although of course the micro-budgeted Blair Witch Project employed a similar idea way back in 1999. “The thing about Blair Witch,” Reeves observes, “is that they use that style very smartly to create suspense that will never be paid off because they can’t afford to pay it off.” While there’s the argument that Blair Witch was effective because it lead the audience to create the largely unseen horror in their own minds, it’s undeniable that Cloverfield presents a gripping big-budget alternative to the intimate point-of-view format which, for better or worse, leaves little to the imagination.

While a rough-and-ready shooting style may come more naturally to independent filmmakers strapped for cash, Reeves found instilling a similar sense in his team of professionals was something of a challenge: “When we have a focus-puller and, you know, somebody walks in and hits their mark, and if that person isn’t sharp, then that person (the focus-puller) loses their job! This all has to be messy.” A solution was that TJ Miller shot much of the footage himself as Hud with an actual handy-cam, as did Reeves as he also qualified for the job by being, well, not qualified for the job. Of course, the pros did some of the work too. “Some of it was that we got our professionals to try and shoot to look as bad as what we were doing,” smiles Reeves, adding, “I’d put our professional camera-operators, with their 50-60 pound cameras, in TJ’s clothing so that whenever you saw his feet, that was TJ’s feet, supposedly, or his hands. And basically it was this giant experiment.”

Of course, the cinematic destruction of New York brought its own concerns, in the post-9/11 climate, and this was something that Reeves and his team were acutely aware of throughout. “I think that all really interesting genre films, for me, tend to reflect the anxiety of the time,” Reeves notes, “They reflect our deep-seated fears.” With Godzilla originally presenting such an overt manifestation of nuclear anxieties, released only a decade after Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, it is perhaps inevitable that the first big-budget disaster movie since the 9/11 terror attacks should focus so significantly on individuals merely reacting to a crisis. Indeed, many of the images in Cloverfield strongly recall home-movie footage of the tragedy, including people staggering through dust-covered streets and taking cover in shops as the monster passes them by. As producer JJ Abrams has previously said, “We live in a time of great fear. Having a movie that is as outlandish as a massive creature attacking your city allows people to process and experience that fear in a way that is incredibly entertaining and incredibly safe.”

This article was first published on Close-Up Film

One Man, His Dog and a CG Apocalypse

‘Infected’ is the horror genre’s buzzword for the 21^st Century. Big-budget film productions are gradually backing away from the classical monsters that defined early horror, the studios apparently fearful of kitsch, B-movie associations and sub-genre pigeonholing. As Will Smith wanders the deserted streets of New York City in Francis Lawrence’s I Am Legend, an assault-rifle slung over one shoulder and his faithful pooch padding alongside, his nights are haunted not by the vampires of Richard Matheson’s original novel, but by infected humans referred to as ‘dark-seekers’, a pretentious phrase seemingly designed to avoid the word ‘vampire’ at any cost. Although aversive to sunlight, they’re in fact more zombie than vampire, victims of an apparent cancer cure that backfired spectacularly and ushered the apocalypse.

The third film adaptation of Matheson’s 1954 novel, I Am Legend saw a decade-long development phase that was delayed even further by the release of Danny Boyle’s 2002 low-budget horror 28 Days Later... . A superior film made for a fraction of the cost of Lawrence’s adaptation, screenwriter Alex Garland borrowed heavily from Matheson in crafting his story of a young man who wakes from a coma to find London deserted. The UK has been evacuated in the aftermath of a savage plague – viscerally referred to as ‘Rage’ – which, upon transmission of infected blood, almost instantaneously strips victims of their humanity and turns them into rabid, demon-eyed, blood-vomiting monsters. It was a shocking vision amplified by a gritty digital format. The film has become a seminal entry in the modern horror genre - finally spawning a belated sequel last year – and ushered a new chapter for the cinematic undead as a source of serious horror. Not that the monsters have at any time been referred to as either ‘undead’ or ‘zombies’. Instead, as with the ‘dark-seekers’ of I Am Legend, they were merely ‘Infected’, knocked several steps down the evolutionary chain by a virus.

George Romero himself took inspiration from Matheson in creating a horror icon when he critiqued America’s involvement in Vietnam in 1968’s Night of the Living Dead, and then satirized Western consumerism a decade later in Dawn of the Dead. Similarly, 28 Days Later… arguably captured the 21^st Century zeitgeist. In the aftermath of 9/11, and in the months preceding the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the fear of weapons of mass destruction, chemical warfare and infection, dominated headlines across the Western world. The Bush Administration insisted Saddam was stockpiling unpleasant chemicals in the Iraqi desert, and tabloids speculated on the likelihood of a terrorist ‘dirty’ bomb hitting London or New York. As though feeding from this dark collective fear of what reprisals the War on Terror will bring to the West, both 28 Days Later… and I Am Legend offer striking images of deserted urban landmarks plastered with billboards warning of infection. The end of the world is a sight the camera soaks up with relish.

The ‘zombie’, the ‘infected’, the ‘dark-seeker’, or whatever name is chosen to ease the route to box-office success, is overdue a serious resurgence. For nearly two decades from the late 1980s, the zombie was effectively confined to the annals of cinematic ridicule, perhaps owing to the torrent of lazy parodies and trashy TV movies that plagued the 1990s (Space Zombie Bingo, anyone?). 28 Days Later…made the zombie scary again, and the film’s massive stateside success was clearly interpreted by the studios, albeit with a characteristic laziness. A remake of Dawn of the Dead hit multiplexes in 2004, jettisoning the consumerist satire of Romero’s original to concentrate on snarling horror that seemed directly inspired by Boyle’s brutal hit.

Once again, however, it was the British who broke new ground in the genre. Comedy duo and Romero-worshippers Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright, released the London-set zombie-homage Shaun of the Dead in 2004. A quirky, hilarious and surprisingly violent affair, the film was billed as a “romantic comedy with zombies”, telling the story of a young man attempting to fix his relationship woes with the added inconvenience of the undead roaming the streets of London. Like 28 Days Later…the film was embraced by the Americans, and even played a part in convincing Romero himself to direct a fourth zombie film of his own. Land of the Dead was released in 2005 to mixed reviews. Indeed, it lacked the satirical punch of his previous outings, although it marked a return to the classic lumbering zombie that suddenly proved no less terrifying than the rabidly hyperactive victims of 28 Days Later…

I Am Legend can, in a sense, be considered Hollywood’s response to 28 Days Later… While similarly dramatic in its depiction of a deserted urban landscape, this time New York, Smith does a good job exploring the psychological elements of the story. Unfortunately his strong performance is undermined by a film that crumbles under the pressures of mass-appeal filmmaking. Abandoning Matheson’s vampires on purely commercial grounds – the studio didn’t want the project pigeonholed as just another vampire movie – the resulting ‘dark-seekers’ are disappointingly digital, looking as though the visual-effects department handed in only half-finished homework. Still, having proved a huge hit across the world, a sequel seems almost inevitable. There is, it would seem, life in the undead yet.

This article was first published on Future Movies in January 2008

The War on Terror Meets the Hollywood Ending

The ongoing War on Terror doesn't play by the Hollywood rulebook. The current lack of anything resembling a final act means that there are plenty of questions, accusations and statistics, but no closure in sight. As with Vietnam the cultural impact has been seismic, and having dealt with the events of 9/11 directly through the likes of Oliver Stone's World Trade Center and Paul Greengrass' superior United 93, Hollywood has now shifted its gaze to the wider conflicts that have arisen from the rubble. The past four months alone have seen the release of three star-studded studio productions, The Kingdom, Rendition and Lions For Lambs, all looking at different elements of the War, while the schedule for the coming months is peppered with similar offerings in the run-up to Awards Season. Terror, it seems, is the Serious Subject of the times, and with a US election less than a year away (and Daily Show presenter Jon Stewart set to bring topical comic-observation to Oscars 2008), Hollywood's royalty are all keen to get a slice of the action.

Despite polished production-values and a strong cast headed by Jamie Foxx and Jennifer Garner, Peter Berg's The Kingdom is less a comment on the War on Terror than a revenge fantasy featuring FBI agents tearing up Saudi Arabia, coincidentally (or not) the kingdom that produced the majority of the 9/11 hijackers. Marketed as an action-thriller with brains, the film was defined by a high-profile poster campaign showing Foxx prone with bullet-proof vest, shotgun and shades. Seizing upon producer - and Heat director - Michael Mann's reputation for technical realism, Universal thrust his name front-and-centre to promote the tale that opens with a devastating terror attack on a Saudi-based US housing compound.

Matthew Michael Carnahan's screenplay phones-in a study of Middle East-West tensions, with the Saudis portrayed as mostly uncooperative and incompetent, while even the Americans come across as arrogant and revenge-driven. The reality, however, is that politics comes a distant second to the balls-out action promised by the poster imagery and bolstered by the "ticking time-bomb of a movie" poster-quote, originating from men's mag Maxim. The film's main selling point is a freeway ambush that leads to a kidnapping and subsequent takedown of a terrorist stronghold in a blaze of automatic gunfire. With Mann lurking behind the scenes, and Peter Berg rapidly establishing himself as a technically adept director, the action is expertly staged, but also more than a little vacuous given the context. Conveniently enough, the team end up killing the mastermind of the opening compound attack, in the process providing the Hollywood Ending that brings a kind of misguided satisfaction. "We'll kill them all" whispers a traumatised Saudi girl, whose apartment has been ripped apart by small-arms fire during the finale. We discover her words mirror Foxx's FBI agent as he comforted a colleague days earlier. The revelation is intended to create dramatic gravitas and draw attention to the notion of violence perpetuating violence, but there's a sense that this is merely a token gesture, and that the death of the movie's criminal mastermind totally justifies the long-term consequences, no matter how bad they be.

Carnahan is also the screenwriting brains behind Lions For Lambs, a self-consciously cerebral take on the conflict that features Peter Berg in a supporting role in one of three story strands. Taking a far more serious stab at the myriad political issues of the War, Carnahan spares only the US infantry from his and director-star Robert Redford's stern finger of blame for America's new quagmire. Co-starring alongside Tom Cruise and Meryl Streep (but sharing no scenes with them) Redford plays a West Coast political science professor trying to inspire a talented but disillusioned student. The film's argument is that America's apathetic youth are squandering their potential, while both the government and the media are guilty of hypocrisy for their parts in initiating and sustaining the conflict. Undeserving of the critical mauling its received on both sides of the Atlantic, the rhetoric may sound familiar, but the presentation nevertheless makes for generally thought-provoking filmmaking, especially through engaging scenes between Cruise's committed Republican senator, and Streep's veteran reporter. The chatter is undermined by a flag-waving thread involving two wounded GIs on tour in Afghanistan, which gradually signals Redford losing his nerve. The final act then nosedives into implausible melodrama and even condescension, culminating in the ludicrous sight of Streep's veteran journalist choking back tears as she returns from the Hill finally 'facing up' to her network's indirect roll in the ongoing slaughter.

Streep switches from enlightened journalist to cold-hearted CIA chief, in Gavin Hood's Rendition, a drama that explores the CIA's 'extraordinary rendition' policy, apparently significantly indulged since 9/11. Involving the covert transport of suspected terrorists to countries where interrogations can take place without legal concerns (with all the torturous trimmings that implies), the film found its cinematic release only months after the British government drew an apparent blank on an investigation into real-life CIA rendition flights, that allegedly used British airports as stopovers. The film focuses on an Egyptian-American abducted by the CIA on arrival in Chicago from a business trip, and flown to an anonymous North African country (clearly Morocco), for questioning, hours after a Morrocan suicide bombing kills a CIA operative. While the abductee is stripped and tortured by the local intelligence officer under the observation of Jake Gyllenhaal's CIA rookie, back in the US the man's wife battles a wall of silence in trying to uncover her husband's whereabouts. Meanwhile, in a third strand, the daughter of the Moroccan intelligence officer has a secret relationship with a young man who is becoming radicalised in a local mosque.

While Hood does a good job exploring the CIA's illegal (and perhaps ongoing) shuttling about of prisoners who may or may not be guilty, the film's finale approaches and the narrative structure eventually makes more impact than its subject-matter. Suddenly challenging the audience's assumption that inter-cut story strands are happening simultaneously (a la Lions For Lambs), we watch the radicalised teenage boy carrying out the film's opening bombing, as Hood reveals that the events of this story-strand have happened a week prior to everything else. Cut back (or rather forward, as is suddenly the reality) to the interrogation and in a plot-device apparently borne of desperation, Gyllenhaal's rookie has a crisis of conscience. In a plausibility-defying move he frees the prisoner himself after what's been a week of brutal interrogation, even pausing to notify the American press of his actions as he orchestrates the getaway. As a relatively painless and tidy close, it's a more palatable result for multiplex audiences.

All three films offer personal closures against the wider backdrop of a war with no end. The Kingdom offers a dead bombing mastermind with no home casualties and Rendition obligingly frees it prisoner, while, in Lions For Lambs, the media accepts responsiblity for its part in the conflict, disillusioned youth are reinvigorated and soldiers fall bravely in battle. The conflict may be ongoing, but when packaged as a bitesize war, the elusive third act is easier to come by. In the coming months, the War on Terror will maintain its presence in multiplexes. Writer-director Paul Haggis' In The Valley Of Elah, Brian DePalma's Redacted, Nick Broomfield's Battle For Habitha and James Strouse's Grace Is Gone are all set to explore different elements of the conflict, from grief to mass-murder and back again. Even the origins of today's political problems will be addressed, albeit in a lighthearted fashion, through Mike Nichols' Charlie Wilson's War, set during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s when the CIA funded and armed Osama Bin Laden. Starring Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts and Philip Seymour Hoffman, it seems few are keen to miss out on the politics of the age, and there are doubtless many stories still to tell. All that's missing is a real-life ending.

First published on the Future Movies website.

The Darjeeling Limited: A Journey With Wes Anderson

"What I'd had in mind was to work in India, and before that, three brothers on a train." Director Wes Anderson describes the creative genesis of his latest feature, The Darjeeling Limited, with disarming simplicity. Whilst certainly, at its most basic level, the tale "of three brothers on a train", there's much more to it than that, as you would expect from a filmmaker proclaimed by some to be the next Martin Scorsese, and certainly one of the most fascinating and exciting American writer-directors. Filmed on location in Northwest India, Adrien Brody and Jason Schwartzman star as brothers Peter and Jack Whitman, summoned to the sub-continent by eldest brother Francis, played by Anderson stalwart Owen Wilson. Having not spoken to each other since their father's funeral a year previously, the three siblings find themselves sharing a cramped compartment on the eponymous train, struggling to both adapt to each other's company and understand Francis' real reasons for such a peculiar family gathering.

Perhaps unsurprisingly for a director whose CV includes quirky titles such as The Royal Tenenbaums and The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, Anderson's latest project experienced a somewhat unconventional journey to the big-screen. Co-written by Anderson, Schwartzman and also Roman Coppola, the story found its origins in Anderson's experiences on his first trip to India. The three friends then made their own journey into the sub-continent, deciding to stay until the screenplay was complete. "[The story] is filled with all our personal experiences," Anderson explains, shortly before the film closes the London Film Festival, "We had an idea that we wanted to make a very personal movie. Practically everything in it is something that happened to either one of us, or someone we know." Writing as they travelled, they went further, actually acting out scenes in public places, that often ended up being used as the actual shoot-locations. It was a method that Schwartzman clearly found a liberating experience. "We'd be walking down the street," he says enthusiastically, "and if we had a scene that took place in a temple we would take out our scripts if we happened to be in front of a temple, and we would act out the scenes. We would see what worked and what didn't work." Anderson smiles as he remembers the crowds gathering to watch three American tourists role-playing in the open. "Without realising it you're surrounded by ten Indian men," he says, "[They're] looking at the script too, trying to make sense of it all, and giving their two cents about it."

Anderson insisted on shooting on a real train for the scenes onboard The Darjeeling itself. The production acquired ten carriages and an engine, and created interiors that fused several different East-West designs. To top it all off, the train ran on live track throughout the three-month shoot. Co-star Adrien Brody thoroughly enjoyed the experience. "The most exciting aspect of that was that it was real," he says in his calm, considered tones, "I think that as an actor your objective is to connect as much as you can to not only your character's emotions, but the environment, and oftentimes in film, the actual environment is very different than what the character is supposedly going through." He adds, "In this case, [Wes] created a very authentic and inspirational environment." Anderson also points out that the train presented "a very intimate working environment" that contrasted sharply with scenes shot amongst crowds of people in the towns and train-stations. As he observed, the train station "was absolutely overwhelmed with people, and [in] the train compartment there's not room for the sound-man!" In these circumstances it's perhaps just as well that family dysfunction, Anderson's speciality, remained firmly in the pages of the screenplay, and the reality on-set was a far more amiable affair. As Brody notes, "I think the fact that we were all in such an exotic location, and we were all on such an adventure, it created a real sense of family and closeness."

In true Anderson style, the story itself has an abundance of subtle character quirks that suggest each character's emotional baggage. From Francis' recent brush with death in a mysterious motorcyle accident (his head is bandaged throughout the film), through Peter clinging onto items belonging to their late father, to Jack scrawling short, ostensibly fictional stories of sibling rivalry and relationship woes. Despite having the opportunity to present rich back-stories throughout the film, the writing team resisted the temptation to deliver too much detail. "We wanted a movie that was a bit more mysterious, that was more sparse, and would imply more than say more," Schwartzman explains, "The audience could make up their own mind about things, and create their own back-story for a lot of what they were seeing." The result is eccentricity, peculiarity and quirky humour, all of which will be familiar to Anderson's fans, and should, if there's any justice, win him some more.

Click here for a full review of the film. This article can also be read at reviews website The Smell of Napalm.

Werner Herzog on Rescue Dawn

"What's his name who did Star Wars?" asks German filmmaking legend Werner Herzog. He nods his head at the mention of George Lucas' name, but rather than launching into an anti-Lucas tirade, as you might expect from someone whose spent decades avoiding mainstream Hollywood, he says instead, "You shouldn't be worried about George Lucas going to the outer galaxy; he's making a film within his culture." It's a refreshing viewpoint, almost too fresh to take seriously, but Herzog's not joking. Cultural identity is important to the Bavarian auteur, who insists, "I have left my country, but I have never left my culture."

Herzog's in good humour, despite just entering his fourth hour of press-meetings. When he first enters the room, in the bowels of London's Charlotte Street Hotel, he moves around the table and gives each one of us (there are eight) a firm handshake and a smile, before we settle down to business. He's in London to promote his latest feature, Rescue Dawn, the true story of German-born US Navy pilot Dieter Dengler who was shot down during a top-secret bombing campaign over Laos in 1966. After spending months on the edge of starvation and subject to medieval conditions in a remote prison-camp, he and fellow prisoner Duane Martin made a daring escape into the dense jungle. Christian Bale takes on the role of Dengler, bringing a sprightly spirit, optimism and unrelenting determination to the character who Herzog says, "had all the qualities I like in Americans." Quick to play down Bale's weight-loss, achieved to portray a prisoner living in such conditions, Herzog states that his primary concern was "to stop Christian from going too much into an imitation of the real Dieter Dengler." He goes on to explain that Dengler's heavy German accent would have never worked for the project, and it becomes clear that Herzog was keen to focus instead on what he refers to as the "frontier-spirit" that kept the pilot alive during his ordeal.

Rescue Dawn in fact marks the second time that Herzog has approached the subject of Dieter Dengler's "wild" life, the first being his 1997 documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly. The film only touched briefly, however, on the time Dengler spent in the prison-camp, and Dengler himself turned to Herzog at the documentary's premiere and said "this is unfinished business". Herzog reveals that the feature-film would have come first if circumstances had allowed it, but funding complications led to the documentary coming to fruition first. Herzog believes that "the films complement each other very well," adding, "in spirit, in its heart, the feature film has always been the first one."

It's clear that Herzog feels a strong connection to Dengler, having invested so much of himself in bringing the pilot's story to the big-screen over the past ten years. The two men shared strikingly similar upbringings, neither having a father-figure in their lives as children, and both suffering from deprivation and hardship in postwar Germany. Although touched upon with only a few lines of dialogue in Rescue Dawn, Dengler's childhood is looked at in Herzog's initial documentary, for which Herzog met with the man himself, in the process forming a close friendship. Dengler sadly died in 2001, but Herzog has a clear and lifelong affection for the man: "Even now, when I get into complicated situations," he says, "I often ask myself: 'What would Dieter have done?'"

Of course, Herzog is no stranger to 'complicated situations', be they physical or emotional. Take Klaus Kinski, the German actor with whom Herzog experienced an at-best tumultuous, at worst near-homicidal relationship, during the filming of such jungle-set classics as Aguirre, Wrath Of God and Fitzcarraldo in the 70s; the mere mention of his name leaves Herzog instantly stony-faced (for the record, Herzog doesn't think Bale, or anyone for that matter, should attempt to tackle a Kinski biopic - the journalist in question hastily adds his tongue was firmly in his cheek). Beyond Kinski, however, Herzog is notorious for journeying to the most inaccessible corners of the world in pursuit of cinematic gold, and of course he's particularly well-known for his apparent affinity with the jungle. In discussing the making of Rescue Dawn, it's clear he relishes a challenge, as he describes scouting for appropriate locations in the thick Thai jungle and discovering a dense wall of vines: "You literally cannot imagine that a human being can penetrate," he says, adding with a sly smile, "we stopped and said 'Let's go for that one!'"

Rescue Dawn may be Herzog's first collaboration with Hollywood actors, with Christian Bale heading up acting talent that includes unlikely casting choice Steve Zahn (as downed helicopter pilot Duane Martin), and also Jeremy Davies as the deluded and antagonistic Gene DeBruin, but otherwise the production is, in Herzog's words, "not Hollywood". Although the lack of pestering studio executives gave him the freedom to shoot the film his way, remaining outside the system brought its own problems. "There was always financial trouble," he says, explaining the pitfalls of working with committed but inexperienced producers: "There was one day when over thirty people in the Thai crew quit because they were not paid in time... I, as a filmmaker, had to make something out of a disaster."

Beyond the set, the film has become the subject of a low-key internet campaign, instigated primarily by Gene DeBruin's family. They object to Herzog's depiction of Gene as deluded and even traitorous, as he is shown threatening to thwart Dengler's escape plan, so convinced is he that their release is imminent. Herzog acknowledges the campaign as unfortunate, but states that he has stayed true to Dengler's story, in bringing the project to the big-screen. Rescue Dawn is Dieter's story, and, for all its apparent controversies, it is without doubt a remarkable one.

Click here for a full review of the film. This article can also be read at reviews site The Smell of Napalm.

A Writer's A-Z of the 51st London Film Festival

Opening with the appropriately London-set Eastern Promises, and closing with Wes Anderson's quirky The Darjeeling Limited, this year's festival was a real treat. Here's my A-Z overview:

A is for Absences
Not to start on a sour note, but although the festival's considered international enough to host the world premiere of Robert Redford's Lions for Lambs, there were still many faces conspicuous by their absence. Opening-night gala duties for Eastern Promises were distinctly Viggo-less, although nobody seemed to really care as Naomi Watts provided all the necessary glamour. Later in the festival, clearly-very-talented-but-not-very-recognisable Chopper director Andrew Dominik arrived on the red carpet for the gala show of his stunning sophomore piece The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford. The cast were nowhere to be seen, with Casey 'Brother of Ben' Affleck having apparently pulled out when Gone Baby Gone was disappointingly dropped from the schedule.

B is for 'Better than Brad'
He and his more famous brother may have pulled out, but Casey Affleck delivers a brilliantly layered performance in The Assassination Of Jesse James. Managing to out-act an on-form Brad Pitt, Affleck plays it subtle in the arguably meatier role of the notoriously villified Robert Ford. His impressive performance in brother Ben's directorial debut Gone Baby Gone should cement his graduation from supporting comic-relief opposite Brad n' George in the Ocean's 11 franchise, to fully certified leading man, although British audiences will have to wait til next year to see the Boston-set kidnap drama.

C is for Crappy Weather
This being London, the gala performance of Lions for Lambs - the biggest of the festival - was blighted by climatic cliche. "I'm surprised this many people showed up," Tom Cruise commented to a BBC journalist, "It's cold, it's wet... Londoners love film!"

D is for Dictaphones
The obligatory tool of every self-respecting journo. A few hours before the gala show of Eastern Promises, David Cronenberg walked into the screening-room of the Soho Hotel to find fifteen voice-recorders littering the table next to his microphone. "I'm having a yard-sale in these afterwards..." he deadpanned. Juno director Jason Reitman, and The Darjeeling Limited's Jason Schwartzman, both felt compelled to turn over the tapes on devices that clicked off in front of them. "They keep turning off when I'm in the middle of answering a question!" Schwartzman laughed in response to murmours of amusement from the crowd.

E is for Entertaining Banter
"It's gonna be awesome!" was Diablo 'Best Name In The Business' Cody's response when she heard that Jason Reitman was interested in directing her debut screenplay, Juno. With Reitman, Cody and former West-Winger Allison Janney bouncing off each other so effectively, the press conference was less a media grilling and more a lighthearted conversation between friends, overheard by fifty members of the press. How else could you hope to learn that Janney finds the idea of trampolining in heels sexy? It is possible she was joking...

F is for Fresh-Faced
The Darjeeling Limited marks Brit Amara Karan's feature debut as a train stewardess who has a fling with Jason Schwartzman's Jack. Auditioning for the role just weeks after graduating from drama school, Karan's initial nerves were well and truly dispensed with when it came to the actual shoot. Describing a key scene between herself and Schwartzman, she bluntly states, "I felt like I nailed that on the first take". Cue a gesture of mock intimidation from Schwartzman.

G is for Gala Performances
Otherwise known as the shows that got all the attention, as the stars came out for the press. Audiences frequently emerged from a non-gala show to find themselves leaving over a red carpet, while they dodged reporters and press-photographers massing for the gala performance that was next on the schedule.

H is for Haneke, Michael
The German director's English-language remake of his own 1997 domestic thriller Funny Games, titled simply Funny Games US, is a devastating comment on the relationship between audiences and the media-portrayal of onscreen violence. Starring Tim Roth and Naomi Watts as an unassuming middleclass couple tormented by disturbed teens Michael Pitt and Brady Corbet, the film is a shot-for-shot remake but nevertheless more effective as a dramatic punch to the gut for the English-speaking world. Juxtaposing a media-influenced teen perception of violence without consequence, with lingering shots of characters recovering from savagely real acts of extreme violence, it's top issue-driven filmmaking.

I is for Inappropriate Questions
With the tabloids providing ample speculation as to Owen Wilson's mental state over the past few months, co-star Adrian Brody professed quiet relief to Wes Anderson that the press conference for The Darjeeling Limited was very civilised. A rare case, perhaps, of the British media behaving themselves.

J is for Juno
Ellen Page stars as the eponymous teen who loses her virginity and gets pregnant on the same night, with unexpectedly hilarious consequences. Expect comic subversion, a screenplay from Diablo 'Best Name In The Business' Cody, and support from former Arrested Developers Jason Bateman and Michael Cera. As the film isn't due out in the UK until February, that's what you call Positive Early Buzz.

K is for Kudos
On a personal note, being a film buff with a press-pass at a film festival really is very, very cool.

L is for London
Bit of a no-brainer, that one. As Michael Caine's iconic tones stated on the official, cooler-than-expected festival trailer, "The best new films, right here in London".

M is for Moore, Michael
Hammersmith Hospital rocks! For his new doc Sicko, Moore tramps around the London hospital seeking out wherever it is patients go to pay their medical bills; his search is long, fruitless and much-mocked but entertaining nonetheless. One-sided as ever, but still outstanding, and frequently shocking, filmmaking polemic that sees Moore return to the inspiring heights of Bowling For Columbine.

N is for No Response
Despite a dozen polite interview requests emailed to publicists, only two replied. Against all expectations, one of them was the representative for Tom Cruise, Robert Redford and Meryl Streep. Unfortunately it was a no, but at least they dignified the request with a response. Suppressing. Bitterness. Now.

O is for Opportunism
Emerging from a press-conference with David Cronenberg and Naomi Watts, a mooch across the bridge back to the South Bank turned into perfect timing for a press-screening of below-the-radar doc The English Surgeon, listed somewhat confusingly in the festival programme as Russian Roulette With Two Revolvers (taken from a striking analogy made in the film). The touching tale of neurosurgeon Henry Marsh's ongoing fifteen-year quest to bring medical resources and knowledge to Ukraine, one sequence in the film follows himself and local colleague Igor Kurilets as they browse a street-market in search of hardware to use in a brain-surgery operation. Yep, a street-market. The film currently faces a future as uncertain as many of the featured patients, although a limited, arthouse release may be happening next year.

P is for Press Centre
Expectations of something not unlike the New York Stock Exchange, with brokers perhaps replaced by dozens of film-writers frantically hammering away on laptops to meet imminent editorial deadlines, proved naive. The reality was a very low-key affair that felt more like the teacher's staffroom at breaktime. There never seemed to be more than about fifteen people there, and a hefty chunk of them were staff. Still, you couldn't fault the resources. Three separate information desks, free net access on big shiny Macs, a handful of sofas, and a full video-library complete with screeners for twenty or thirty of the smaller festival entrees.

Q is for Quite Slow
Time slows down when Adrian Brody speaks. Not one to be rushed, the Academy's youngest ever Best Actor has the air of a true artiste determined to deliver a considered answer in his own time. This doesn't always suit the PR, whose nervous watch-checking intensified when Brody spent several minutes talking about filming on a fake boat for Peter Jackson on King Kong, as a sort-of relevance to shooting on a real train for Wes Anderson on The Darjeeling Limited.

R is for Reitman, Jason
Laidback and amiable, the Son of Ivan ended up staying behind for ten minutes after the Juno press conference to talk to curious journos about the pros and cons of the iPhone, three weeks before it was released in the UK. Just a cool guy.

S is for Swanky Hotels
The Soho Hotel in, well, Soho, may be impressive, but Clarridges has the edge. Elegant and sophisticated, if a little too Donald Trump when it comes to the gold trimmings, it was host to the press conference for The Darjeeling Limited. The slightest hint of disapproval could be noted on the faces of some of the more senior staffers as our ragtag band of journos massed by the surprisingly small lift enroute to the surprisingly compact 6th floor conference room. The lift may have been small, but it did have a sofa.

T is for Technical Problems
No public event is complete these days, it seems, without those minor hitches drawing attention to an embarrassed techie somewhere. The gala performance of this year's Palme d'Or winner at Cannes, Romanian abortion drama 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days, was a resounding success and played to a packed-out audience. Writer-director Cristian Mungiu and star Anamaria Marinca introduced the film, or at least we presume they did, as they could barely be heard past the tenth row, while the post-screening Q&A session was plagued with similar problems. Meanwhile, the Juno press conference was underscored with constant electronic interference. When the PR eventually wrapped things up, he thanked everyone for a discussion "broadcast simultaneously in morse-code".

U is for Unnecessary Cancellation
Ben Affleck's impressive directorial debut, child-abduction drama Gone Baby Gone, was pulled from the schedule and has had its UK release put back til next year, owing to similarities with the Madeleine McCann abduction. The film has drawn added attention owing to the young actress' striking resemblence to Madeleine McCann, and the fact that the actress' real name is also Madeleine. Coincidental creepiness aside, the decision to postpone its release seems unnecessary given that a) the film is really quite good, b) questionable content in Hollywood's general output is routinely ignored by the media and c) nobody has to watch it if they don't want to. Having said that, the postponement will certainly delay a seemingly inevitable cry of insensitivity from The Daily Mail.

V is for Very Early
Once the festival was officially opened, the majority of press-screenings took place mid-morning in order to free up cinemas for the public shows after midday. For anyone used to working late into the night, morning screenings take a bit of getting used to. That probably explains why attending journos tended to be bleary-eyed and wrapped up in endless layers of warm clothes, their hands cradling a hot beverage, and a glint of annoyance in their eyes as they signed in with the relentlessly chipper festival staff.

W is for Wild, Into The
Sean Penn's best film as director, Into The Wild is the true-life story of Christopher McCandless, who marked his 1992 college graduation by donating his entire $22,000 college fund to Oxfam, assuming the name Alexander Supertramp, and setting out on a two-year trek across the continental United States to Alaska. Inspired, touching and tragic stuff.

X is for, er, Xander Berkeley
A jobbing actor perhaps best known recently for playing Jack Bauer's boss in the first few seasons of 24, he also played 'Railroad Foreman' in this year's Seraphim Falls (stay with me here...) Seraphim Falls is a Western, as is The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford, which played at the festival. He may well have been at the festival too... but probably wasn't. X is a real toughie...

Y is for Yuck!
A particularly unpleasant afternoon in a North London sauna results in some necessarily extreme self-defence moves for Viggo Mortensen's mob-affiliated 'driver' Nikolai in Eastern Promises. 250-odd audience members cringe simultaneously.

Z is for Zoo
The festival's token touch of controversy was provided by this documentary exploration of a Seattle-based group's indulgence in bestiality. Evasively described by IMDB as "a look at the life of a Seattle man who died as a result of an unusual encounter with a horse."

London Film Festival Special: Cronenberg Delivers Eastern Promises

"David's got a wicked sense of humour," smiles Naomi Watts, a few hours before the Canadian director's latest feature Eastern Promises opens the London Film Festival. "Thank you," Cronenberg replies quietly, adding, "The set was very funny... it really is fun, if you do it right." Their comments are seemingly at odds with a film which has been reduced by many to a single, already-infamous sequence where a naked Viggo Mortensen fends off a couple of vicious, fully-clothed Chechen assassins in a sauna in London's Finsbury Park. Renowned for his graphic portrayals of physical trauma, Cronenberg delivers a sequence of intense brutality which is such a far-cry from standardised, sanitised Hollywood, that it's not surprising the scene has found such infamy. That said, the film's periodic lashings of blood and brutality are punctuated by equally unpredictable moments of wry, often dark humour, be it Russian gangsters casually prepping a body to be dumped, or Mortensen's mysterious Nikolai trying, and failing, to start Watts' motorcycle: "Take a bus" Nikolai soon deadpans.

Set in the murky underworld of London's Russian mafia, Eastern Promises offers a view of the city rarely seen even by those who call it their home. Indeed, the only recognisable landmark on offer is the Gherkin building in the City, and this only appears fleetingly in the background of a single shot. The notion of capturing the 'real' London resonated particularly strongly amongst the crew, most of whom were local. "The crew were pretty excited to be shooting there instead of Notting Hill," Cronenberg states dryly. Although the film's story is instigated when Watts' midwife Anna looks to uncover the identity of a young migrant girl who has died in childbirth, this is Mortensen's show. Having already worked with Cronenberg on his previous feature A History of Violence, the former King of Gondor is totally convincing as the mysterious Nikolai, the shadowy associate of a ruthless Russian crime family. His subtle, restrained performance was, according to Cronenberg, undertaken "with a great sense of humour". Further dispelling the myth of the introverted character-actor, the director adds, "After 'cut' he's still Viggo, and you can still joke with him".

Viggo's performance immediately elevates the film above the 'issue-movie' label that some have been quick to attach. Although the relatively low-profile crime of people-trafficking is a major element of the story, it is also a backdrop, with themes of family and identity receiving more attention in Steven Knight's screenplay. Nikolai remains a mysterious character for much of the story, his behaviour and motivation rarely clear, and his few words and restricted body-language giving little away. We're offered similar conundrums in the form of Anna's Russian uncle, Stepan (Jerzy Skolimowski), whose alleged background in the KGB may not be as crazy as it first seems, and Tatiana, the teenage migrant whose death in the film's opening scenes initiates the story. We hear her diary-extracts read in periodic posthumous voiceover as Anna has them gradually translated, turning her from an anonymous and unidentified fatality into a rounded and tragic victim of eastern promises, as well as a warning of the savage criminal world into which Anna inadvertantly stumbles.

Through such past classics as The Fly, Videodrome, Scanners and the infamous Crash, Cronenberg is renowned for his fascination with how the human body interacts with the outside world, and the relationship between biology and machinery. Taking this into account, it's perhaps not so surprising that there are no firearms in Eastern Promises, although this was the case even before the screenplay came to Cronenberg's attention. Instead, the violence is instigated with blades and razors - generally anything with a sharp edge. "To kill someone with a knife is a very intimate, perverse act," the director explains, "it means you feel them, you smell them, you hear them breathing." Similarly, Knight's screenplay draws attention to the 'story' of tattoos that characterizes the Vory V Zakone brotherhood to which Nikolai's family belongs. A particularly intimate scene towards the film's finale sees Nikolai fully initiated, after years as a mere 'driver', and an elder reading his life-story through the myriad tattoos that already decorate his body. With reference to the sauna assassination-attempt, Cronenberg explains that the assassins "would be destroying the tattoo-pattern on [Nikolai's] body, and would leave a message for other people not to betray them."

The film has met with overwhelmingly positive reviews, including, as it turns out, the indirect mark of approval from the Russian mafia itself. "Over the net we've discovered we get two thumbs up from Russian criminals" Cronenberg states, adding with a sly smile, "We're just not sure whose thumbs they are..."

Click here for a full review of the film. This article can also be read at reviews site The Smell of Napalm