David Hughes

The Killing

2015-02-12T05:23:00.001-08:00

Jean-Luc Godard famously said a story needed a beginning, a middle, and an end, “but not necessarily in that order.” Kubrick was way ahead of him, ripping up the rules of straight-arrow narrative with this classy crime caper, whose cut-up chronology laid the foundations for Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction four decades later.

Sterling Hayden, who would later give a career-best performance in Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove, leads a group of criminals in a daring heist, making off with the $2 million takings from a racetrack by creating twin diversions: shooting the winning horse, and starting a bar brawl. The plans are precisely laid out, but duty bound – not least because of the Hays Code, in force at the time, which insisted that crime should not pay – to go disastrously wrong. “In a crime film, it is almost like a bullfight,” Kubrick mused. “It has a ritual and a pattern which lays down that the criminal is not going to make it, so that, while you suspend your knowledge of this for a while, sitting way back in your mind this little awareness knows and prepares you for the fact that he is not going to succeed.” So it’s not a matter of if the meticulously-planned robbery will go wrong, but how – and how badly.

With author Jim Thompson (The Grifters, The Killer Inside Me) supplying suitably hard-boiled dialogue, The Killing was adapted from Lionel White’s throwaway crime novel Clean Break with a level of precocious artistry to rival that of Orson Welles. Indeed, Welles was one of the first to declare Kubrick’s genius, suggesting that while The Killing was clearly influenced by John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle (1950), Kubrick’s film was superior – a case, he said, of “the imitator surpassing the model.” (Kubrick, unsatisfied by the book’s ending, borrowed the one from another Huston film, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.) Critics were equally swift to pour praise on Kubrick’s film, and in a genre crowded with superb films, from The Godfather to Heat and The Town, The Killing continues to rank as one of the best crime flicks of all time. As such, it’s well overdue for a remake, and although the 1993 French film 23h58 – which shifts the action to a motorcycle racing track – is closely modelled on Kubrick’s film, and an announced remake starring Mel Gibson came to nothing in 1999, an update is virtually redundant, since the original is as fresh and exciting today as it was nearly sixty years ago.

Like hundred-dollar bills in an aircraft’s propeller wash, it’ll blow you away.

The Turning (★★★★ Empire Review)

2015-02-09T03:30:00.001-08:00

An anthology of subtly interlinked short Australian films, adapted from Tim Winton’s short story collection, each intended to represent a turning point in the lives of its diverse cast of characters.

Portmanteau films can be tricky, unless the disparate stories are somehow woven together, as in Short Cuts, or this anthology of adaptations of the subtly interlinked stories comprising acclaimed Australian author Tim Winton’s elegiac short story collection. Each adaptation (including those by actors Wasikowska and Wenham) captures the yearning, regret and melancholy of the stories – Byrne is particularly outstanding as a woman who escapes an abusive husband and finds solace in the arms of another man: Jesus – so it’s a pity that several of the segments have been shed on the way to the UK: perhaps they were considered too (unapologetically) Australian.

Aussies assemble! A wealth of Antipodean talent bring their ‘A’ game to this melancholic, anthological adaptation of short stories by acclaimed Aussie author Tim Winton. Warning: you may need something less depressing (say, some Nick Cave tunes) to cheer yourself up afterwards. ★★★★

Joe (★★★★ Empire Review)

2014-10-05T09:51:00.002-07:00

Ex-con Joe (Cage) finds a new reason to stay on the straight and narrow when he becomes a reluctant father figure to troubled 15-year-old Gary (Sheridan), whose father (Poulter) is a violent alcoholic.

It’s rare that a director and their literary source is as well matched – Robert Altman and Raymond Carver’s Short Cuts comes to mind – as in the latest film from David Gordon Green, which finds him returning to his Southern gothic roots as he tackles the late Larry Brown’s 1991 novel, in which the eponymous ex-con does his best to rescue a 15-year-old boy from a life of vagrancy and physical abuse at the hands of his father. When the film in question also boasts a return to form by Nicolas Cage, it’s almost obligatory to sit up and take notice. Cage has, of late, been filling out his prolific resumé with films ranging from the outlandish (the Ghost Rider films, Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans) to the out-and-out rubbish (everything since the underrated The Weather Man), but Joe finds him reigning in his customary tics and outbursts, arguably giving his most understated performance since his two-second appearance in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and his best since he won an Oscar for Leaving Las Vegas.

Since getting out of jail, Joe has been trying his darnedest to make an honest living, running a crew of unskilled workmen whose job it is to poison old trees to make way for new saplings – a metaphor, perhaps, for the poisonous substances that have blighted the lives of so many in the hardscrabble South. Perhaps, in Gary (Mud’s Sheridan), Joe sees a younger version of himself, and determines to take care of the boy as he would a stray dog. “Folks looking for trouble tend to get more than they ask for,” scarred barfly Willie-Russell (Ronnie Gene Blevins) observes early on, but Joe isn’t looking for trouble, and damned if it doesn’t find him anyway.

The last time a filmmaker tried to tackle Larry Brown’s particular brand of Southern-fried prose (Arliss Howard’s Big Bad Love), the only good thing to come out of it was Tom Waits’ soundtrack. Green and Brown, however, prove as well matched as their colourful names suggest: the performances (many from non-pros) are uniformly terrific, the story is slight yet compelling, the mood mournful but not miserablist, Tim Orr’s sun-dappled cinematography recalls Badlands-era Malick, and the entire tapestry is knitted together by Jeff McIlwain and David Wingo’s music; the only disappointment is the sidetracking of the book’s female characters. Whether or not you’re a fan of Brown’s writing, Green makes a convincing argument for why you should be.

VERDICT
An understated Nicolas Cage – there’s a phrase you don’t get to write too often – anchors a superbly realised film which, like Joe himself, has a hard outer shell concealing a surprisingly warm heart. ★★★★

Tony Benn: Will and Testament (★★★★★ Empire Review)

2014-10-03T04:47:00.000-07:00

An intimate and personal reflection on the life, work and legacy of one of Britain’s most influential, charismatic, contrarian and controversial political figures.

Whatever your view of the late Anthony Neil Wedgwood Benn’s politics – and he would have fought for your democratic right to that opinion – his simple dedication to the question of right and wrong makes a persuasive argument for every one of the causes to which he devoted his parliamentary and political life. Thankfully, he lived to see the completion of Kite’s brilliantly conceived and immaculately realised documentary, which traces Benn’s private and political life and achievements from political awakening to veteran campaigner, without ever feeling like hagiography. If there’s any justice, it should inspire the kind of political engagement for which Benn was justly renowned.

VERDICT
A worthy documentary tribute as classy, engaging, politically astute and rabble-rousing as the late, great Mr Benn himself. ★★★★★

A Promise (La Promesse)

2014-08-01T12:07:00.002-07:00

Germany, 1912. An ailing industrialist (Alan Rickman) hires a young man (Game of Thrones’ Richard Madden) to help run his business, only to find the boy falling for his wife (Rebecca Hall).

Anyone introduced to Stefan Zweig by Wes Anderson’s patronage (The Grand Budapest Hotel was inspired by the Austrian author’s stories) – and, come to think of it, anyone who likes good films – would do well to steer clear of this torpid, turgid adaptation of his novella “Journey into the Past”. It’s a rare but calamitous misstep from Patrice Leconte; clearly, he was going for the kind of subtle yet stifling undercurrent of sexual tension found in Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence, but Hall and Madden have all the sexual chemistry of a table and chair, and even the normally reliable Rickman cannot lift this above the level of an ITV Catherine Cookson adaptation.

VERDICT
Set in Germany, directed by a Frenchman and acted – terribly – by English people, it’s the worst kind of Euro-pudding. On this evidence, UKIP may have a point. ★

Adjusting the Picture: The Outer Limits Movie (1994-2014)

2014-06-19T23:33:00.001-07:00

On 16 September 1963, two months before the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the UK broadcast of the first episode of Doctor Who, audiences watching the American Broadcasting Company might have been forgiven for thinking their televisions needed tuning, as wavy lines filled the screen before the picture shrank suddenly to a white dot. Only then did a voice, somehow both reassuring and discomfiting, explain that there was nothing wrong with their television sets. “Do not attempt to adjust the picture,” it intoned, or warned. “We are controlling transmission.” After a demonstration of this control, during which the volume, position and clarity of the image were seemingly influenced by an outside force, the voice went on to invite viewers to participate in a great adventure. “You are about to experience the awe and mystery which reaches from the inner mind to… The Outer Limits.”

That the narration, known as ‘The Control Voice’ and voiced by Vic Perrin, sounded like Rod Serling, host and creator of popular anthology series The Twilight Zone, was no coincidence. Since its series début in 1959, The Twilight Zone had supplanted Science Fiction Theatre as the public’s favourite sci-fi mystery series, with 120 episodes having been broadcast by the time The Outer Limits’ première episode, ‘The Galaxy Being’, aired. Ten days later, The Twilight Zone’s fifth and final season began. Although the science fiction theme, anthology format, and presence of a stern-voiced opening and closing narration marked creator Leslie Stevens’ The Outer Limits out as an obvious competitor for The Twilight Zone, episodes of the newer show ran for a full hour, allowing room for a deeper exploration of the scientific, philosophical and even existential themes than The Twilight Zone’s irony-tinged twist-in-the-tail half-hour formats. In addition, as David J Schow, author of The Outer Limits: Official Companion explains, “In general, Twilight Zone stories were about ordinary people swept into extraordinary situations and The Outer Limits, if anything, was the opposite of that, with its roster of eccentric loners, misfits, and determinedly atypical characters.”

Running for a total of 49 episodes across two seasons, The Outer Limits featured a great many chilling, eerie and even downright terrifying stories, and is notable for having given birth to several science fiction legends, including Mr Spock’s ears (modelled on those of David McCallum’s character in ‘The Sixth Finger’) and James Cameron’s The Terminator (inspired by Harlan Ellison’s teleplay for ‘Soldier’). The series ended in 1964, and despite rumours of a revival in the sci-fi-friendly 1980s, it was not until the success of such shows as Star Trek: The Next Generation, Babylon 5 and the anthology series Tales from the Crypt that rights holder MGM became convinced that the time was right to revive The Outer Limits. The new series, produced by John Watson and Pen Densham’s Trilogy Productions, and broadcast on US pay-TV channel Showtime, débuted in 1995 with a feature-length episode based on George R. R. Martin’s novel Sandkings. The series ran for seven seasons, and had amassed more than 150 episodes — three times more than its 1960s progenitor — when it was finally cancelled in 2002, by which time the Sci Fi Channel (now Syfy) had taken over production and broadcast of the hour-long series.

Even before the revival of the television incarnation of The Outer Limits, plans were being drawn up by Mark Victor, writer of MGM’s hit Steven Spielberg production Poltergeist and writer-producer of its sequel, for a big screen outing, which Victor and his producing partner Michael Grais would potentially produce. “It was a project that I always thought would be a hit,” says Victor, “in that it had an identifiable, hungry audience… not so large that it was obvious, but that it could really build and become a worldwide hit. And that title is worth, at least in my mind, a fortune in itself. It’s so easy to promote.”
The success of MGM’s first major science fiction project, Roland Emmerich’s Stargate (1994), which grossed almost $200 million worldwide from an estimated $55 million budget, doubtless helped convince the studio’s executives of The Outer Limits’ potential. For Victor, however, the original show’s key producers, Leslie Stevens and Joseph Stefano, proved to be a more significant hurdle. “It was difficult to get Stefano on the same page as Stevens,” Victor admits. “Leslie was anxious to go forward with it, but Stefano was very ‘up and down’ about it.” Victor sensed that the two producers had not spoken in many years, and that each felt that they should be the one in the driving seat. Eventually, Victor addressed this problem with a ‘most favoured nations’ deal, under which Stevens and Stefano would receive equal credit, and equal pay, regardless of their eventual contributions. This, however, precluded either Stevens or Stefano from writing the script, “because the other one, psychologically, wouldn’t allow it, or thought they should be the one to write it.”

The successful revival of the television series gave the project a boost, but added a new complication: a pre-existing agreement that allowed the new show’s producers, John Watson and Pen Densham, a production credit on any future incarnations of the show, including feature films. In fact Watson and Densham had invited some of their Outer Limits writers to pitch stories which might form the basis of a potential feature film.

The first of these, completed in August 1997, was Alan Brennert’s Control Group, a melding of H. G. Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, in which Dr Matt Bergman, a geneticist working on a cure for his son’s autism, accelerates the evolutionary trajectory of a chimpanzee, transforming it both mentally and physically with astonishing rapidity. But when the chimp bites one of Bergman’s colleagues, it unleashes a virulent disease which enhances the physical appearance of those infected and removes behavioural inhibitors so that the id is unchecked. The second, written by James Crocker and dated December 1997, takes place in a Martian biodome, where a life-extending substance is harvested from the sap of a kind of tree which can only be grown on Martian soil. But something else is feeding on the sap: a terrifying, predatory alien creature which attacks the human colonists one by one, cocooning the females and thereby adding to the general ‘Alien clone’ feel. The third proposed story was Sam Egan’s New Breed, dated 1 September 1998. Like Brennert’s Control Group, the story concerns a pioneering scientist’s creation of a kind of cure-all, in this case a “surgical SWAT team” of nano-bots which, when injected, can repair almost any physiological damage, from blindness to cancer, physical injury — even death. When a group of experimenting teens (like the young medical school students from Flatliners) inject themselves with the serum, they find that not only are they virtually indestructible, but, as with Brennert’s tale, behavioural inhibitors are affected, and soon the ‘good’ superhuman teens are fighting their ‘bad’ counterparts — like Heroes might have turned out if it were set in a single college and everyone had the cheerleader’s power.

Several drafts of each of these approaches had been overseen by Watson and Densham by the time they learned of the potential conflict of interest with Victor and Grais. “There was a dispute about rights with Victor and Grais and there was a potential lawsuit and it was all ugly,” Watson recounts. “So we elected to meet with them and say, ‘Rather than no movie happening, why don’t we figure out how to team up on it and see if we can do something together?’” As a result, instead of suing and counter-suing over what was essentially a bureaucratic error in the MGM legal department, the four producers — Watson and Densham, Victor and Grais — decided that collaboration would be the best way to take the project forward. “We reached out,” says Densham, “and generally enjoyed the relationship with them. Sometimes those marriages can be awful, and sometimes they can be valuable. And we felt that by not getting defensive, but by just saying, ‘Listen, together maybe we can get this movie made,’ we found a new foundation and we shared both the company’s efforts and our relationships with the studios, which were very deep.”

It didn’t hurt that, thanks to his legacy on the Poltergeist property, Victor had a good relationship with MGM head Chris McGurk, the man with the power to give the Outer Limits movie a green light. “He was a visionary, in his own way,” Watson says of McGurk. “He had this property which he thought was exploitable and would make for a great movie, but he wanted to do it on a bigger scale, [whereas] we were developing movies in the lower budget range, around $10 million.” McGurk’s notion was to make a James Bond film one year and an Outer Limits movie the following year, and alternate both properties. In addition to the question of scale, Watson recalls that McGurk had several other diktats. “He specified that it had to be contemporary, it had to have aliens involved, and it had to deal somehow with how these aliens had an effect on Earth people today, so it was relatable.” Densham wrote a treatment for a story, developed with Watson, which followed a group of modern day humans who had been kidnapped by aliens. Victor and Grais, however, chose not to move forward with it. “And again, this was cordial,” Densham points out. “We really believe that one works hard in this game and that you get more out of it by being constructive. So that, if we say that there was conflict, it was an opinion that was shared openly and honestly. I mean, it’s hard enough to get things made in this business. Why would you want to make it more difficult?”

Scouring old episodes for inspiration for the feature film, the producers found two problems: firstly, many of the stories had provided inspiration for other properties; secondly, none of them had the scale Chris McGurk felt the film required. “I agreed it should be a significant movie,” says Victor. “It had to be bigger than the TV show, because when you go into a movie theatre, you’re expecting all the elements that you identify with that show, but you have to take advantage of the big screen. You can’t give them the exact same thing that they can see on TV.” Instead, the producers decided to begin with a blank sheet of paper, inviting veteran screenwriter Gerald DiPego (Phenomenon, Message in a Bottle), and his sons Justin and Zachary, to pitch for the project. “They came in with a story that frankly didn’t work,” Victor recalls, “and I sort of gave them all the mandates of what I thought this movie was supposed to be. They went away, and they came back with enough of a premise and a twist that it got me excited.” Says Densham, “They came in and pitched an idea, which was very complex, very well worked out; an elaborate and very clever pitch. We showed it to the studio and got the go-ahead to start the writing deal.”

The DiPegos’ story was indeed original, although it melded several elements familiar to science fiction fans — elements of Outbreak, Species, The Matrix and 28 Days Later — in depicting an invasion of Earth by extra-terrestrial beings able to disguise themselves as humans, but in possession of superhuman powers, such as teleportation. Rather than unleashing the kind of destructive force depicted in sci-fi stories from War of the Worlds to Independence Day, however, the aliens in the DiPegos’ script had a more intriguing modus operandi: a highly infectious disease spread through counterfeit currency crawling with nano-agents which invade the brain, turning humans into virtual zombies, unable to resist the will of their new masters. Call it Invasion of the Carpetbaggers.
The story opens in a village in Myanmar, where a strange phenomenon is first witnessed: without warning, people fall into a kind of ‘standing coma’, seemingly the result of a strange paralyzing disease spread by touch. The United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID), a military equivalent of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) previously seen in the movie Outbreak, flies in to investigate, but the local government, fearing a setback to the lucrative tourist trade, deports them and burns the ‘coma’ victims alive…

As these horrific events unfold, the script introduces the protagonist: John Cooper, a former pilot retired from the US Air Force after a unexplained crash, now living in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with his girlfriend Laura, scraping a living as a cable guy. It is while Cooper is repairing the TV of his old friend Chet — where we see the old introduction to the show, as Chet flips channels — that he stumbles upon a video feed of the bodies being burned in Myanmar. “Damn it, I don’t want news,” says the curmudgeonly Chet. “This isn’t news,” a horrified and fascinated Cooper replies. “It’s between channels.”

Suddenly, and simultaneously, the strange paralyzing disease breaks out in other parts of the world, causing chaos: entire cities literally come to a standstill, a train crashes into a station in Bombay as the driver falls into a coma, five airliners fall out of the sky as their pilots succumb to the disease. At each of the locations where these incidents occur, the audience is shown a group of individuals — a skinny man (SLIM) in Bombay, a bulky Asian (JUMBO) in Myanmar, a man with a flat-top haircut (HAIRCUT) in Tanzania, and a gorgeous female (BEAUTY) in the United States — handing out money to the locals. Meanwhile Cooper fiddles with various electronic gizmos, trying to isolate the source of the military satellite feed he saw earlier. Unbenownst to Cooper, the source is the USAMRIID team — Dr Jo Prescott, Colonel Terry Glanvil, chemist “Jack” Rabbit, and Robert “Diet” Coke — sent in to investigate the outbreak. The government sends in a man named Haggerty, who takes charge of the investigation just as a new symptom of the disease is revealed: if one of the standing coma victims is touched, they react with extreme violence and hostility, akin to the blind, spitting rage seen in Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later. When Coke is attacked in this way, he quickly becomes infected, confirming that the contagion can be spread through touch.

With startling rapidity, the epidemic takes hold elsewhere in the world: China executes victims in an attempt to contain it; quarantine camps are set up in Europe; the first cases are diagnosed in Montreal, Canada; before long, Times Square is at a standstill. The government urges people not to panic, as news of the contagion spreads fast — but the disease is spreading faster. Villages, towns, cities, communities, governments, social infrastructures are collapsing throughout the world — and we’re still only at page twenty-four. Cooper and Laura pack up and head for NORAD, Cooper’s former air base at Cheyenne Mountain, where the USAMRIID team has made a bizarre discovery: a hundred dollar bill taken from one of the victims is teeming with trillions of tiny, squirming objects. Parasites? Bacteria? “It’s neither,” says Haggerty. “Not unless bacteria have gears.” The objects are biomechanical: part organic, part machine; highly evolved nano-agents which enter through pores in the skin and lodge in the cerebral cortex, interfering with brainwaves, paralyzing the carrier. It’s highly contagious. It spreads through money — and someone is deliberately spreading the wealth… Running various tests, they find a way to track the counterfeit currency: no matter what the outside temperature, the nanite-coated money maintains a constant temperature of 61.5 degrees Fahrenheit. Thermal satellite imaging narrows the search to the nearest concentration of currency: San Francisco.

Cooper and Laura reach NORAD, where various VIPs, military personnel and scientists are trying, without success, to gain access. One by one, all of them succumb to the sickness — even, in a heartbreaking scene, Cooper’s beloved Laura — until Cooper is the only one still moving, arousing the curiosity of those inside. They bring him into the base, theorizing that his immunity may result from damage to the hippocampus — the part of the brain affected by the nano-agents causing the ‘disease’. Cooper explains that the injury may have been caused when he crashed his experimental aircraft, since when he has had blackouts and memory glitches. Desperate to stop the disease in its tracks, the USAMRIID soldiers head for San Francisco by helicopter, taking Cooper along for the ride. There, they spot the skinny man (Slim) spreading money, and pursue him to a Macy’s department store, where the showdown is hampered by Slim’s apparent ability to teleport, or ‘blink’, short distances instantaneously.

By chance, the team discovers that they can short out Slim’s teleportation using radio waves — but when they corner him and gun him down, twisted metal tendrils shoot out from his wounds with deadly force. Finally, they manage to outgun and overpower the creature, which an impromptu autopsy confirms is not human. “The skin is some kind of bio-suit,” Haggerty explains, “a living genetic disguise. The outside has complete human functions: blood in the veins, pores in the skin, facial hair.” “Counterfeit people handing out counterfeit money,” says Cooper. No one has seen anything like it before — except, it transpires, for Haggerty, who admits that the bodies of similar creatures were recovered from a crash site in Chile five years earlier, but that the government hushed it up. Shouldn’t the government have been prepared, one of the team asks. “For an invasion?” Haggerty responds drily. “For an army? They didn’t come with an army. They took our planet without firing a shot. They just handed out money. Gotta admire them for that.”

From here, the script becomes more action-oriented, echoing Species as the team encounters another of the aliens: Beauty, who reveals a deadly defence mechanism which makes the creatures extremely dangerous to injure. Later, in one of the script’s eeriest and most chilling scenes, everyone suffering from the sleepy sickness suddenly begins moving, shuffling along with unknown purpose (shades of M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening), “an endless wave of comatose people — all heading in a uniform direction.” Soon they begin assembling in circles, their eyes turned upwards, as though awaiting the arrival of visitors from the sky…

“We did an internal draft with the DiPegos before we shared it with anybody, contributing our skill at working with scripts,” says Watson, pointing out that he and Densham had overseen more than 150 shows for The Outer Limits, not to mention forty-four episodes of their 2002 revival of The Twilight Zone. “You know, there are only two great supernatural fantasy science fiction anthology shows in American history, and we were able to revive them both,” he says. “We love science fiction. You’re in a world where we could talk for hours, and as you can imagine, we had a lot of ideas that were constructive to help the DiPegos’ script get stronger before we presented it to the studio. Victor and Grais had their thoughts included in that process, too. Then I think we handed it in to the studio, and got a fairly strong positive response, if my memory’s right.”

Armed with the DiPegos script, the producers set out to find a director for the project, narrowing the choices down to one: Rupert Wainwright, the British-born director of a recent MGM hit, Stigmata. “Oddly enough, I think I had offered Rupert what would have been his first feature film when we were doing Sleepwalkers,” says Victor, “but I don’t think he was quite comfortable with that at the time. He was doing music videos and commercials. So I had been familiar with Rupert, and I knew that he was brilliant, visually. Michael Nathanson, the president under Chris McGurk, was a fan of his, and McGurk had certainly known about him from Stigmata.”

Wainwright was on the verge of taking another film when he was contacted about The Outer Limits, but even though he didn’t think the current script was perfect, he felt it was full of possibilities and ideas, and agreed to pitch for the job. “He was a ‘high energy’ guy, and he came in with a really strong take,” remembers Densham. “He had some terrific visual ideas,” adds Victor, “and I think that he has a science-based thinking which helped tie things together so that they were logical.” Wainwright recalls that he did not have time to make a full presentation, “but I took something like forty books and Post-It Notes into the first meeting, and I just tried to overwhelm them with information overload and enthusiasm.”

Despite the considerable momentum behind the project, and everyone’s enthusiasm for Wainwright, the director recalls that neither the producers nor the studio were ready to commit. “Everybody liked Rupert, and everybody liked his take,” confirms Densham. “But he did want to do substantial changes to the script, which I think gave us pause.” Says Wainwright, “I kept thinking, ‘If they don’t book me on this, I’m gonna have to go to Europe and start scouting the other film, and then do the other film.’ But then the people who were doing the other movie put a trade announcement on the front page of The Hollywood Reporter announcing that they’d hired me, that I was starting immediately and that Wesley Snipes was probably gonna do it. And the minute MGM saw that, they called me up to book me. It was just classic.” Instead of a traditional development deal, in which a director might be given $25,000 to develop a project over a number of months or years while pursuing other offers, Wainwright was given an unusually high holding deal, so that the studio effectively bought his services for six months, paying him an advance against his salary, “in this case around fifty per cent of my entire salary, just to hold me for six months — which was extremely rare.” The studio, Wainwright reasoned, was serious.

Wainwright’s first order of business was typical of incoming directors: to mould the script into a shape he was more comfortable with. Says Victor, “I think the DiPegos had achieved quite a bit. The structure of the story, the ‘throughline’, was good. I thought the characters, for what we wanted, were maybe a touch soft. And the last third was maybe a little too much of the ‘blow-’em-up-and-shoot-’em-up’ type of thing.” Wainwright says he offered to stick with the original writers, which would have suited Watson and Densham. “Being writers ourselves, we tend to be sympathetic to people who create ideas,” Watson explains. “But it didn’t happen, so I guess we didn’t fight hard enough.”

Wainwright and the producers began meeting with other writers, without success. “It was either a writer we really liked but they had a terrible take, or it was a writer that had an awesome take but their writing sucked,” he says. “We couldn’t find anybody who had the right combination. The studio didn’t necessarily want a name,” says Wainwright, “but they wanted somebody they felt was going to deliver. They didn’t want to take a ‘fishing trip.’” British screenwriters Dane McMaster and David Hughes1, who had written an unproduced script entitled Killing the Gods for Wainwright, were among the writers asked to pitch. So too was The Crow screenwriter David J Schow, who had written two episodes of the new Outer Limits television show. Says Schow, “He called me because we had worked on projects together and he had actually read my book and understood the ‘identity’ of The Outer Limits in a way that consistently eluded the producers of the remake series.” regarding his approach, he adds, “Having had several ideas over the years for what I thought was one Outer Limits-flavoured story or another, I would have respectfully requested a page-one overhaul. A global alien invasion plot where humans become zombie functionaries had to be handled very gingerly to seem like it had Outer Limits pedigree – that is to say, it would have to be a small, tight, focused story with the invasion as the backdrop, and the script they had wanted to be a sort of global tentpole blockbuster. Not to hit the irony too hard, but it seemed like just another makeover of Invasion of the Body Snatchers – an alien takeover plot handily solved by a character who turns out to be the darling of destiny.” Says Wainwright, “I love David, but to be honest he never really came up with a take on it that blew us away.”

Everyone eventually agreed that the next writers to tackle the project should be David Weisberg and Douglas Cook, who had written the ‘spec’ script which eventually became the hit movie The Rock. “The idea was to make the script more energetic, a little more ‘run and jump’, and a little more ‘high tech’,” says Watson; “to make things gel in a way that was far more action oriented.” The next question concerned the writers’ methodology. One approach would be for Weisberg and Cook to submit a ‘beat outline’ explaining what they planned to do; alternatively, they could go ahead and begin writing. “Either way is a little bit tricky,” Wainwright explains, “because if you do a beat outline, it’s the bones but not the flesh, but if you just let them get on with it, you don’t know what you’ve got until 110 pages come in after what might be three months.” Ultimately, a third approach was agreed upon, whereby Weisberg and Cook would write twenty pages per week, delivered on a Friday, which would then be reviewed over the weekend, before the next twenty pages were written, and so on. At first, it seemed like a good idea, as Wainwright recalls. “The first twenty pages came in, and they were awesome. Unbelievable. Couldn’t be better. All of us were congratulating each other on how brilliant we were, you know: ‘I found them first.’ The next twenty pages: not bad, a bit action-y, but still good. The mystery wasn’t really there, and it was a little The Rock-ish, but still okay. The next twenty pages — crap! It’s now turning into a Jean-Claude Van Damme movie. So we’re thinking, ‘Woah, Nelly! Slow down, slow down!’” “We thought their version was too active and losing character,” says Watson. Densham agrees. “We definitely felt we didn’t have strong characters, frankly, either in the DiPegos version or their version,” he says. “The lead guy was not really involved enough.”

Meanwhile, the studio was dangling the prospect of a green light. “There was a lot of pressure to try and figure out what the last issues were in the script that would please McGurk and get him to feel that he would stamp it a ‘go movie’,” Watson explains. The situation was complicated by the arrival at MGM of a new executive, who had his own perspective on what The Outer Limits should be, “which is basically a smaller, creepy movie, whereas our movie is turning into a huge Close Encounters/Independence Day/Signs kind of film. We gave him the first sixty pages, and he said, ‘This is a piece of shit! I hate these writers! We need to start again from scratch.’ So we’re slightly embarrassed, and we’re saying, ‘We told you it wasn’t perfect,’ but we want him to be involved. So then there was a bit of a crisis.” “We had two different groups inside MGM,” Watson adds. “One was trying to get the movie together for Chris McGurk, and he, in turn, was trying to reach around those guys and saying, ‘Just give it to me. I don’t want to wait for what they do.’ And that, politically, was a difficult place to be, and we did our best to navigate it without upsetting anybody. But at the same time, Chris is the kind of guy that likes an ‘open architecture’ kind of management style, and we responded to Chris because we were dealing with him on other projects and other ideas.”

Wainwright, having backed two writers the incoming executive now hated, felt that his job was under threat. “Luckily, I’d done this huge presentation,” he says. “I’d cut a trailer from found footage, I had a ten minute presentation of designs we’d done, and storyboards galore, and I showed them that before I showed them the script because I knew the script wasn’t where it needed to be. So luckily that enthusiasm level kept them going. Normally we would get the blame, but somehow we dodged that bullet, and they basically said, ‘Great project, great director, great producers — but the script sucks.’”

Wainwright and the producers set out to find another writer, putting forward Zak Penn, whose credits included Last Action Hero, Inspector Gadget, Behind Enemy Lines and the first of his two sequels to The X-Men. “He came in and did a brilliant pitch,” says Wainwright, “and he said, ‘I can’t tell you the whole story, but this is where you go wrong.’ He said, ‘Listen, I’ll tell you the truth. You might find guys who write better dialogue than me, and write better characters and tell better jokes than me, but I’ll be frank with you, when it comes to structure, I’m one of the best guys.’ He said, ‘I’ve got these five weeks here, I’ll do this for X amount, in five weeks, and you might have to do a little dialogue polishing, but you will know that you have the movie.’ So we were like, ‘Okay.’” The studio, however, refused to hire him, apparently doubting that Penn would be able to deliver on his promises in only five weeks.

Instead, the studio proposed another writer — a veteran of the A-list, who Wainwright describes as “a complete prick,” but who he and the producers agreed to for largely political reasons. “I knew the studio liked him, so I was predisposed to hedge my bets a little bit,” Wainwright admits. “He was a good character writer, he wrote classy stuff — he wasn’t a guy who does ‘punch-ups’ on Michael Bay movies — so it felt like it was a smart way to go.” The new writer was engaged in the run-up to Christmas of 2002, just as Wainwright and the producers were heading off on vacation. “I figured he was going to spend the two weeks over Christmas working out what he was gonna do, then he was gonna pitch it to us, and then he was gonna do it. Boy, how wrong was I!”

The unnamed writer had been working on it for a week when Wainwright organised a conference call, which he recorded and transcribed, between himself, the writer and the four producers. “I’m expecting the writer to say, ‘I’m gonna do this, this and this, but I haven’t done any of it — I’m just waiting for your blessing.’” Describing the conversation as “brutal,” Wainwright elucidates. “I say, ‘So, how’s it going?’ ‘It’s going extremely well, but I’m not sure if I wanna submit it to the taste test.’ ‘I’m sorry? What does that mean?’ ‘Well, if you’re a chef and someone orders a meal, you don’t just start handing around the food before it’s been cooked.’ So we said, ‘Okay, we don’t wanna mess with your system — just give us the beats.’ And he said, ‘Well, I’ve already started writing.’ ‘Great! What are you writing?’ ‘Well, I can’t really talk about it because I’m already writing.’ ‘Well, how are we gonna know what you’re writing?’ ‘Well, you’ll know when I send you the script.’ ‘Okay, excellent. But we’re all pretty hands-on and invested in this thing — we’re not just sending it out here…’ And he said, ‘I’ve already told you what I’m gonna do: I’m gonna improve the story, I’m gonna give you real characters you can root for instead of these cardboard characters,’ and so on. At this point, I’m thinking this could go really pear-shaped, and I’m expecting the producers to say, ‘Oh that’s bullshit — just tell us what the hell is going on!’ And they’re really mellow. And I’m very aware that this is being recorded and I’m going to hand out the transcript to everybody, so I say, ‘Well, as far as I know, you haven’t even been ‘commenced’. You gotta let us know what you’re doing.’ I’m not too pushy, but I’m firm. And he says, ‘Rupert, I’m sorry, I don’t work this way. I’ve already been commenced. I’m writing. I’m on this for three weeks, and I don’t have the time to spend hours and hours on conference calls discussing what I’m doing. I’ve just got to do it!’ And he didn’t quite hang up, but…” Wainwright, knowing that the writer was friendly with the head of the studio, decided not to push it. Finally, a week behind schedule, the script was delivered. “Three hours later we all came out of our offices and looked at each other and said, ‘We’re fucked. We’re totally fucked.’”

Unbeknownst to them, the writer had sent the script to the studio at the same time, without giving them the courtesy of a ‘producers’ read’ — “which,” says Wainwright, “is unheard of. So we’re all thinking, ‘What do we do?’ We don’t wanna call the studio up and say, ‘We hate it!’ until we’ve found out what they think. Because by now we’ve been at bat once and not quite struck out, but been given a pass. This time, it was a much more expensive writer and the studio had a lot of faith in him, and we were gonna have a lot of egg on our faces if we struck out a second time. So we’re all prepared to go, ‘We don’t love this, it’s pretty fucked up,’ but not go out and say we hate it because maybe they’ll like it and want to start moving forward, and we can do the tweaks. We just wanted to get the movie made at this point — not at any cost, but we figured it’s gonna change anyway, and this guy’s not gonna be the last writer… And the studio calls up and says, ‘We really like this.’ And we’re saying, ‘Yeah, we think there’s a lot of good stuff in there.’” Wainwright called the writer and explained their views. “I said, ‘I just wanna say, I think it’s fabulous. I just have a few notes, so I just wonder if we can sit down…’ And he said, ‘Why don’t you just send me the notes and I’ll do ’em?’ And there were about forty pages of notes, starting on the third word! ‘When you say “FADE IN” — does it have to be “FADE”?’” With the budget edging towards $80 million, by far the biggest film Wainwright had worked on, the director was acutely aware of the precariousness of his own position. “I was very keen not to screw up,” he says, “but at the same time, there were things in the script that made me allergic. It was very goofy.”

Another conference call was arranged, “at which point the guy does this whole bipolar switch on us, and turns out to be really charming. He says things like, ‘I’m just a vessel for your creativity.’ He said, ‘We’ll have a meeting, we’ll go through the notes, and if need be, Rupert can literally move into my house, and we’ll sit there side by side at my computer and do the script exactly how he wants it, and you guys can go make your movie, and it’ll be perfect.’ So we’re like, ‘You can’t argue with that, can you?’” The meeting was scheduled, with Wainwright, the four producers and the writer. “It was the frostiest meeting I’ve ever been in in my life,” Wainwright recalls. “If there was one way of curing global warming, this was it.” In the space of two hours, the producers had only talked through ten pages of the script, at which point it was obvious to everyone it wasn’t going to work. Worse still, Wainwright’s reservations as the film’s would-be director were not shared by the studio. “They were like, ‘We see what Rupert’s saying, and he’s not wrong, but we don’t necessarily feel as strongly as he does about something really needing to be changed. We don’t dislike it as much as he does. We could probably live with it.’ So when you hear that, you don’t really want to kill the goose, but you also hope you can get to a place you think is right. And you kind of hope that the writer is gonna go, ‘All right, well, that’s why I did it, but if it doesn’t work, I’ll go fix it.’ But we had two meetings like that, and at the end of it we knew we had to let this guy go.”

Once again, The Outer Limits needed a new screenwriter, and the producers were taking no chances, opting for a hot writer with a recent sci-fi hit on his resumé. Leslie Bohem, who had scripted disaster movies Daylight and Dante’s Peak before writing Steven Spielberg’s miniseries Taken, seemed like the perfect fit. “I started reading the scripts for Taken, and they were so good, I started ordering the next episode so I could find out what happened. I mean I didn’t like it, I loved it. It was a huge epic, going from the Roswell crash in 1947 up to the present day. It was great.” Wainwright, Watson, Denham, Victor and Grais met with Bohem, who did not seem to have a clear idea of the direction he wanted to take The Outer Limits, but won the studio’s approval and was hired. “We figured we’d work it out as we went,” says Wainwright. “Third time’s the charm, right?”

Almost immediately, Bohem claimed to have a broken computer. Wainwright promptly lent him a laptop. Then the director learned that Bohem was friendly with one of the studio higher-ups and had been discussing plot intricacies with that executive, bypassing the chain of command, i.e. Wainwright and the producers. “Wait a second — we’re producers being hired by the studio, and we’ve hired you so you can present something to us so we can present to the studio,” Wainwright reminded him, asking to be conferenced in to any future conversations between Bohem and the executive in question. Bohem, says Wainwright, reacted poorly. “He says, ‘Listen, if he’s gonna call me, I’m gonna talk to him, okay? That’s just it.’ So I’m like, ‘Okay.’ And he said, ‘By the way, about your laptop — if you want it, come and pick it up.’ And I said, ‘Okay, it’s cool.’ And he said, ‘No, it’s not okay. I quit. I don’t want this job.’ And he hung up.” Wainwright waited a few minutes for Bohem to cool off, but was unable to reach the writer for the rest of the day. Finally, the director reached Bohem’s agent by phone. “He says, ‘Yeah, he doesn’t want to do the job. There’s too much politics involved. He quit.’” Wainwright immediately began freaking out. “I mean, he quit while he was on the phone to me,” he says. “It couldn’t be much clearer about where the problem arose.”

Wainwright called the producers to try to explain what happened and found them in remarkably mellow moods. “They said, ‘Maybe we should just leave him alone and see what he comes up with.’ And I remember what happened the last time we left a writer alone with The Outer Limits.” Neverthless, he agreed to try to win Bohem back — without success. “So then we were really up shit creek,” says Wainwright. The studio called a meeting with everybody, threatening to fire the producers. “And they’re looking at me as if to say, ‘Why don’t you fire this asshole? He was on the phone when the writer quit!’ So this goes back and forth and back and forth, and in the end they go, ‘Okay, you’ve got one more shot.’” Once again, Wainwright had won a reprieve — this time, he reasoned, because, as the studio saw it, it was the producers’ role, as seasoned screenwriters, to develop the script. “I think that’s why I dodged a bullet repeatedly,” he says.

“One of the difficulties was that the executive in charge of the script changed at least three times during the development,” says Victor. “When that happens, you’re dealing with a person with a different taste. And everyone has their own idea of what The Outer Limits is, and frankly, I would say that one of the executives probably wasn’t even much of a sci-fi fan.” Studio head Chris McGurk, however, remained a steady enthusiast of both the project and its director, extending Wainwright’s holding deal with what he describes as “extremely generous” top-ups, to the point where he had been paid almost three quarters of his director’s fee. As a result, MGM agreed to increase his fee so that he would not be working for free when the movie began shooting. “It was getting more and more insane.” Yet again, the producers sought a screenwriter, preferably one as close to the A-list as possible.

“Everybody came in from a different perspective,” says Victor. “Some wanted to blow it up and start over, and some wanted to nurture it forward.” The writer they chose was James V. Hart, whose credits included Robert Zemeckis’s Contact and several well-received drafts of Ridley Scott’s unproduced film based on the bestseller Crisis in the Hot Zone. If the combination of science fiction and disease expertise seemed to make him a perfect fit on paper, Hart’s take on The Outer Limits also impressed the producers. The studio, however, remained uninvolved. “They were like, ‘If you wanna hire him, hire him,’” Wainwright recalls, “which was a big sign that we were basically walking into an ant’s nest. I think the studio saw the same writing on the wall that we did, which was that if Hart got involved and screwed up, the producers and the director would look like shit, but they wouldn’t because they didn’t back him.” After two conference calls and a meeting at which Hart “was great in the room,” it was agreed that Hart would begin writing, delivering twenty pages at a time, just as Weisberg and Cook had done several months before.

Once again, it was four o’clock on a Friday afternoon when the first twenty pages were received, and Wainwright and each of the producers sat down separately to read them. “We all walked in after about twenty minutes, and we just hated it. We were stunned. We’re so unhappy with it, we’re ready to shoot ourselves. We’re like, ‘What the hell are we gonna do now?’” One of the producers, Pen Densham, didn’t agree with their assessment. “When he read it, he said, ‘I don’t know what your problem is, guys. It’s not perfect, but it’s all there.’” Densham wondered if it was a matter of losing perspective after so many rewrites. “I think everyone had gotten frustrated with the process of development,” he says, “because every time you bring in a new writer, they introduce variables, and to fix one thing, another thing falls off.” “We were so depressed and freaked out,” says Wainwright, “I think he just wasn’t as beaten-up as we were at that point, so he had this ‘Let’s fix it’ attitude.” Densham offered to work on a rewrite, and by the next day, he was fifteen pages into it. “He came in and showed it to us, and we were just like, ‘Dude, you just scored!’ It turned out he was right — [Hart’s draft] wasn’t all wrong. It was just like ‘turds in the punchbowl’: there are just a couple of lines on the page that make it look as though the whole thing’s fucked, but if you take those out — if you take the turds out of the punchbowl — you’re like, ‘Hey, this is delicious!’”

Hart, meanwhile, continued writing, “but the more he wrote,” says Wainwright, “the more horrible it became. It got worse and worse and worse and worse.” Finally, Wainwright and the producers, all seasoned screenwriters, divided up Hart’s pages and began rewriting them twenty pages at a time, working mostly in Wainwright’s office, while Hart worked away at his home in Virginia. “We had no idea what we were doing,” the director admits, “because these pages that were coming in were just terrible. We had started off with the DiPegos’ script, which was pretty good, but not perfect. Then we had this script, which had some interesting ideas, but, again, wasn’t perfect. So we kind of wanted the best of those scenes, and anything that didn’t quite fit we would have to add to or delete. Pen Densham broke the ice and did a lot of the heavy lifting, and then Mark, John and myself spent literally all the time during the week rewriting — sometimes together, sometimes separately — with me stitching everything together on my computer.”

Adding to their woes was the fact that all of them had a different style. Victor, for instance, could only write longhand, because he could not type. Wainwright felt unable to write a scene from scratch, but could rewrite a scene that already existed. For three hours, every Monday at 9.30 a.m., Wainwright and the producers would literally compare notes, not only with each other, but with their assistants, even the receptionist. “Obviously some opinions we valued more than others,” says Wainwright, “but everybody’s was listened to. And sometimes we’d get eighty pages into the script and we’d realize that a turn we’d made on page forty was totally wrong, and we’d have to go back and change the last forty pages after two weeks of steering in one direction.” Meanwhile, Hart was churning out more pages, unaware that he was being rewritten by committee, a turn of events which might well have had him reaching for his representative at the writer’s union. “But, meanwhile, it seems like it’s coming along,” says Wainwright. “Scenes were working. I’ve gotten completely inspired by it; I’m writing brand new scenes, and everyone’s loving it. Finally, we get it done — all 120 pages of it — and everybody reads it over the weekend and loves it.” After another collaborative polish, the draft was handed in to the studio, positioned as “basically Jim Hart’s draft, but with a few tweaks of our own.” Says Victor, “I was very pleased with that draft. I think we were all proud of it.”

On Monday morning, after the traditional ‘weekend read’, during which executives traditionally read scripts they are currently developing, Wainwright received a call from the studio executive who had joined part-way through production. “He calls me up as I’m driving into the office, and he says, ‘Rupert. One: this is amazing. Two: Jim Hart didn’t write one word of it.’” Wainwright knew the game was up. And yet… the studio loved it. “He said, ‘Everyone’s read it, and we love it.’” Wainwright agreed that it was an improvement. “And he says, ‘It’s not an improvement. It’s a brand new script — and it’s awesome!’”
Suddenly, The Outer Limits was back on track. “We were quite a long way along the process,” says Watson. “We went to umpteen effects houses trying to figure out who we thought would do the best job. We went on location scouts, trying to find a place that would give us the New Mexico desert look, and we found terrific locations up in British Columbia, east of Vancouver. We even found this empty town, kind of a ghost town, where tuberculosis patients were living back in the fifties, and all of these buildings and schools and town halls were all intact, but there was no one living there.” The producers hired a line producer, Jim Dyer (an executive producer on HBO’s Rome), and worked on budgets together. “We were battling to get it within that budget — you know, allowing X amount of dollars for the lead actor. Although, from my memory, we never got as far as going out to actors.” Several actors were, however, considered. “Russell Crowe was on our list,” says Densham, “Nic Cage, people like that. People who were sufficient to carry the movie but would be a great pair of shoulders to put the movie on.”

Now all that stood between the $80 million picture and a green light was the chairman of the studio. “Then he read it, and he loved it, but he hated the third act,” says Wainwright. “In the end it boiled down to about four lines in one scene that he didn’t like, but it took us about three weeks to find that out and fix it.” Finally, the studio decided to bring in one more writer to do an eleventh-hour polish: Hillary Seitz, whose sole screen credit was the remake of Insomnia in 2002, but whose duties as an uncredited ‘script doctor’ had included remakes of The Italian Job and Flight of the Phoenix, and the long-gestating sci-fi hit I, Robot. “I think the studio wanted to spend some more money and have a fancy-ass writer,” Wainwright says, noting that Seitz had been on the producers’ wish-list before, but had been turned down. “I think when she read it before she just didn’t get it. But she read this draft, and said, ‘I love it! What do you want me to do? I wouldn’t change it!’ So I said, ‘We need you to give it your blessing. Tweak it. Don’t fuck it up. They’ll love it even more.’” Wainwright went to Seitz’s house and worked with her for two weeks. “Sometimes the studio feels that the more they pay a writer, the better they like them,” he says. “When the studio read it, they said, ‘God, we love it! Now it’s ready!’ And we’re like, ‘You’re so right!’ So then it was full steam ahead.”
In all this time, through all of the different drafts, the story remained substantially the same. The final draft, dated 17 October 2003, is far more action-oriented, as though channeling the James Cameron of Aliens rather than, say, the M. Night Shyamalan of Signs.

“The throughline of the original story was still there,” says Victor. “There were a lot of ‘technology’ ideas that were laid in that I think were probably smart, but they didn’t change the story. What I would say changed the most is the relationship between the guy and the girl. Their characters came far more to life, and were much more fun and engaging.” Wainwright agrees. “It never changed that much,” he admits. “The big difference between the DiPegos draft and the Cook/Weisberg draft was that in their version, you really went overseas to see things unfold. Five aliens had been dropped, one had forgotten he was an alien and the other four were working their way around the world. And the disease was zeroing in on America, and we emphasised that a lot more, and created a whole team of alien hunters. We created this character who wasn’t [that significant] in the DiPegos draft, who was kind of like a Van Helsing [character] — the expert alien hunter,” he adds, referring to a central character named Haggerty in earlier drafts and Dr Boothe in the final version. “He was really cool. And he gradually got better and better, and then I think Jim Hart beefed him up a lot, basing him a little bit on [a character from] his script for Crisis in the Hot Zone. So we took that and made him a little bit more philosophical.”

While Wainwright and the producers waited for their green light, events elsewhere in the industry began to have an effect on The Outer Limits. Firstly, the studio had been put up for sale, with Universal Studios or Sony Pictures Entertainment the likely buyers. Secondly, on Christmas Day 2003, Shawn Levy’s remake of Cheaper by the Dozen had stormed the US box office, making Steve Martin a bankable star for the first time since Father of the Bride a decade earlier and prompting MGM to fast-track its plan to team up Martin and Levy for a proposed revival of its lucrative Pink Panther franchise, which had lain more or less dormant since the death of its erstwhile star, Peter Sellers, in 1980. Fiscal prudence, especially in the light of the proposed sale, meant that MGM could not afford to make both films in the same six month period. “They only had enough money and enough freedom to do one movie on that scale and budget,” says Densham. “And the Steve Martin one was just a tad more of an acknowledgeable asset, so they pushed that, I think, to get the company a more economically viable profile.”

A key factor in the studio’s decision making process was the fact that The Pink Panther had obvious sequel potential, whilst the Outer Limits feature being prepped was a standalone story, meaning that any future sequel would have to begin from scratch. This was probably achievable on television, but almost unprecedented, not to mention risky, for a feature film property. (One that does come to mind is Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight, the 1995 feature film inspired by the horror anthology series. It was proposed as the first of a trilogy, but when the second instalment, 1996’s Bordello of Blood, bled red ink at the box office, the third instalment was cancelled.) And yet, as Victor points out, “If you did a second movie that was completely original and worked, you could do these forever, because you wouldn’t be reliant on being able to get the same cast all the time. I realize that’s probably a more difficult sell, but there’s a good argument to be made for both.” Ultimately, MGM picked the surer thing, rushing The Pink Panther into production and pushing The Outer Limits back to spring/summer 2004. Might the decision have gone the other way if The Outer Limits had managed to secure a bankable star, as The Pink Panther had done? “You could argue that,” says Watson. “Or you could argue that they paid $60 million for a movie that should have cost $25 million, and that, considering they had made Barbershop for very little money, it was a lot of money to spend on a comedy. Outer Limits was designed to be ‘Spielbergian’ — to get toy lines, to bring in the fan base and the general public. We were designed to be a merchandising phenomenon.”

Adding to the producers’ frustration was the fact that they had met all of the studio’s concerns over the story and script, and the all-important budget. “We were given a budget of $80 million, coming down from $100 million, which was originally what they bandied around,” says Densham. “And we got to that budget level, and at that point, they green light the Pink Panther movie. We had gone through all the hoops and all the hurdles, got the script right and got Chris McGurk on board, and put all the team together. That had taken us eighteen months to two years. Then it was the studio being sold which apparently finally torpedoed us from getting made.” Says Wainwright, “We realised that [MGM majority shareholder] Kirk Kerkorian wanted out. He was going to sell MGM, and the next six months was basically spent with everyone sitting around with no projects getting made.”

The producers had one more shot, however, when Constantin Films read the script and offered to fully finance the film — not for $80 million, but for a modest $50 million — for which they would take international distribution rights, leaving MGM with domestic. “I think we could have done that,” says Victor, “but the feedback I got was that the new [studio] entity wasn’t very enthusiastic about it, or not able to do it — I really don’t know. The bottom line was that nobody was saying yes.” Adds Wainwright, “It was an awesome deal, but they couldn’t get it done.” Perhaps chairman and chief executive officer Harry Sloan saw The Outer Limits as a potential tentpole series, and felt that the title may have more perceived value if the films were as yet unmade.

“I think exploiting the brand was more important to the studio than capturing the correct ‘feel’,” says David J Schow. “What they were left with contained a few interesting ideas, but none really spoke to what I see as the Outer Limits ethos. Subsequent drafts just milled around endlessly, circling and complicating the basic idea until it was incomprehensible. It really seemed to be a kitchen sink approach. I think something like thirteen writers tackled it and they came out with nothing, due to a classic case of too many cooks,” he adds. “Nobody bothered to consult Joe Stefano, and he was the single unifying personality behind the first season of the show. The movie could have benefited from that kind of vision, but alas. I think it might have also benefited from the eye of someone like Rupert who at least had the basic visual and thematic coursework in his brain. Once you knock the theme and story, it’s all in the visual sensibility, which is an approach that could have helped ‘code’ the movie as an Outer Limits offspring. Sadly, it never got that far.”

After the lengthy accounting process known as due diligence, MGM was acquired by a partnership led by Sony on 8 April 2005, by which time Rupert Wainwright was busy directing a remake of John Carpenter’s The Fog. Meanwhile, Watson and Densham have seen stranger things happen in Hollywood, and even suggested that the film’s appearance in this book [The Greatest Sci-Fi Movies Never Made by David Hughes] might give it a boost. “We wouldn’t be surprised to find that this book comes out, and someone reads it and says, ‘Shit! This was that good. All right!’ It’s advocacy. The bizarre thing about our game is that there are too many projects out there for the number of slots available, so what gets made tends be the stuff that someone else salutes. So by you saying, ‘This is a great script,’ they will all go back and look at it with a certainty now, as opposed to the uncertainty when they were looking at it the first time.”

“I think it’s really fun and engaging,” says Mark Victor. “A big, suspenseful movie with numerous surprises and scenes you’ll remember, like all of those people being drones and just walking, and the idea of the disease being spread through money. I think there was some very good visual work that Rupert had done where the effects would go. I think it would be fresh, and it would be a tremendous ride for any audience. It was very disappointing,” he says of the film’s failure to launch. “I’d say, between Pen and John Watson and myself and Rupert, that we couldn’t have put much more into it. We put in maximum time and effort to move this along, because we all really cared about it.”
Wainwright goes even further. “I was in love with it.”

Originally published in The Greatest Sci-Fi Movies Never Made by David Hughes

© 2008, 2014 David Hughes

Giger: Swiss for 'Genius' (Interview circa 1997)

2014-05-13T07:18:00.000-07:00

Drop the name HR Giger into conversation using its correct pronunciation – Gee-ger, like 'eager' – and you will almost certainly get a blank look in return. Repeat it using the American mispronunciation – Geiger, as in 'Geiger counter' – and almost every science fiction and horror fan will say, “Oh, Geiger!” – before enthusing at length about the artist's work.

Giger may never be acknowledged by the art world as the natural successor to Spanish surrealist Salvador Dali, but even outside the science fiction, horror and fantasy genre, Giger is widely known as the artist who designed a terrifying panoply of monsters for the film Alien. Giger may not be quite a household name, but his Oscar®-winning designs for Ridley Scott's 1979 horror opus are unlikely ever to be forgotten. Why? Because fifteen years before Steven Spielberg and others made the world believe dinosaurs could once again walk the earth, a thirty-five-year-old Swiss artist named HR Giger convinced us that a creature more advanced, more adaptable, more terrifying, and above all more dangerous than anything on earth not only existed, but was coming to eat us. Indeed, if the Swiss ever get around to inventing their own language, those who admire his work would not hesitate to suggest that ‘Giger’ might make an apt translation for ‘genius’.

Hans Rudi Giger was born in Switzerland on February 5th 1940. At the age of nineteen, he began work as a construction illustrator (a kind of junior architect), attending Zurich's School of Arts and Crafts at the same time. However, despite this early artistic promise, the first illustration which might conceivably be classed as 'Giger-esque' did not appear until 1963, when Giger was already twenty-three years old. Entitled The Beggar, it depicted the disturbing image of an unnatural human arm-and-leg fusion, which Giger has since named 'Armbeinda', proffering a hat as if to ask for money. As his school and local underground presses began to publish his surreal sketches, his bizarre style quickly earned him notoriety within the Swiss art world, and by 1967, following the first of many exhibitions of his work, he had enough commissions to devote himself fully to his own unique brand of fine art.

Giger's work first came to international attention with the publication in 1971 of A Rh+, his first portfolio (named after his blood type), and, two years later, his album cover design for progressive rock group Emerson, Lake and Palmer. His American fan base had soon grown dramatically, and it would not be long before he became involved – thanks to a recommendation from none other than Dali himself – with gonzo filmmaker Alexandro Jodorowsky, who thought Giger would be perfect to conceptualise a film version of Frank Herbert's mammoth science fiction novel, Dune, which Jodorowsky was planning to direct. Money proved difficult to raise for the ambitious project, however, and Giger's vivid, extraordinary designs for the project remained quite literally on the drawing board. Nevertheless, it was as a direct result of his work on the stillborn Dune that he came to the attention of British commercials director Ridley Scott, who was set to follow his well-received feature debut, The Duellists, with a science fiction thriller written by Dan O'Bannon. It is impossible to say whether this movie, under its unlikely working title of They Bite!, would have been made, let alone regarded as one of the greatest horror movies ever made. But as Alien, there can be no doubt whatsoever that it did.

Unfortunately, Giger's ride through the turbulent world of film design since the international success of Alien has, as is widely known, been less than smooth. Following his triumph at the 1980 Academy Awards ceremony, the artist was surprised to find the film world's most prestigious accolade more of a curse then a blessing – at least in his native country. As he explains: “The Oscar® was not very good for me in Switzerland, because the museums stopped taking paintings of mine and didn't invite me to make shows with other people. They thought I had sold out to Hollywood.” In fact, nothing could have been further from the truth, for although several poor quality films (such as Galaxy of Terror, Deep Space and The Intruder Within) cheerfully plagiarised his work for their monsters – or, more usually, their video covers – it would be another six years before Giger was officially engaged on a film that actually made it into production.

This occurred in 1985, when Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was preparing to capitalise on the success of the Spielberg-produced smash hit horror film Poltergeist with a hasty sequel, that Giger was engaged on a project that, at least on paper, looked worthy of his talents. Unfortunately, Giger's conceptual designs for the film were far more ambitious than the special effects technicians of the day – and, in all fairness, the film's budget – could accommodate, and as a result, Brian Gibson's Poltergeist II: The Other Side (1986) was a great disappointment to fans of the first film – and Giger in particular.

The same year, James Cameron's Aliens proved a far more popular sequel than Gibson's disappointing effort, but Giger was equally unhappy with the way Cameron's film turned out. First of all, much to his regret, the artist was not engaged to work on the film at all; instead, Cameron's close colleague Stan Winston was asked not only to slightly modify Giger's original alien design, but also create from scratch the alien queen herself; ultimately, Giger received only a token credit for 'original alien design'. Secondly, like many people, Giger felt that the sequel had emasculated his creature, turning the xenomorph from near-invincible predator to mere ‘cannon fodder’ for the Colonial Marines’ robot sentry guns.

As it happened, Alien 3 director David Fincher agreed with this point of view, stating in one interview that he thought Cameron's film “worked because of the sheer scale and how little you saw of these fleeting glimpses in the strobes of the machine guns firing,” but that he saw Alien 3 as an opportunity to “make the alien scary again.” As well as wishing to rectify what he called “qualitative errors” made in Aliens, Giger had his own reasons for wanting to work on Alien 3: since Poltergeist II, the artist had been involved in several other aborted feature films, including Ridley Scott's proposed science fiction film The Tourist, and, for low-budget filmmaker William Malone (Scared to Death, Creature) a film called The Mirror, an ambitious horror film inspired by Giger's 200,000-selling artbook Necronomicon. Perhaps a little too ambitious, as Giger explains: “It would have cost a lot of money to do it well. But Bill Malone usually makes his films on a very small budget, and I couldn't think of a way to do this film as a low-budget production.” When, in 1988, as a direct result of the box office failure of George Romero's Monkey Shines, Orion Pictures dropped The Mirror, it seemed as though Giger was in for a run of seven years' bad luck.

This began in earnest when, in July 1990, David Fincher and 20th Century Fox approached the artist and invited him to design several new life forms for Alien 3, including an aquatic face-hugger, a bovine chestburster and an all-new, quadrupedal version of the adult alien. Fincher, already the third director to be officially assigned to the troubled film, implied that Giger would be given the same degree of control he had enjoyed on Alien more than ten years earlier, and the artist had no reason to doubt him. He immediately began to work “like crazy”, furiously sketching and faxing designs for a four-legged creature he described as “more elegant and beastly” than his original – “more like a lethal feline, a panther or something.

“[The] new creature is more sensuous and seductive,” he stated at the time, “not at all monstrous or ugly. The lips and chin are better proportioned, giving the creature its more erotic appearance.” Working on his own initiative and spending his own money to ensure the film had his best possible input, Giger and his regular modelmaker Cornelius de Fries built several maquettes and a full-size sculpture of the new creature, offering further assistance to the production at only the cost of materials. By this time, however, contact with Fincher and his producers had been severed, and Tom Woodruff and Alec Gillis of Los Angeles-based special effects house Amalgamated Dynamics Inc (ADI) had been engaged to redesign the alien for the film. “When I heard that Woodruff and Gillis had their own version of the alien,” he later lamented, “I began to think that they didn't appreciate mine, and that they probably had already sold Fincher on their ideas.”

In fact, the final version of ADI's creature looks suspiciously like Giger's design, yet despite having worked for six intensive weeks on every aspect of design for the creature, the artist once again received only an 'original alien design' credit – suggesting that he had not been involved in the film at all – and denied a second Oscar® nomination and public recognition of his hard work. Deeply disappointed and hurt by the Hollywood machine, Giger reluctantly decided to decline future film work – unless he had an opportunity to work with a director (in particular, fellow Europeans Ridley Scott and Clive Barker, or taboo-breaking Davids Lynch and Cronenberg) whom he felt sure would give him the freedom to fully realise his bizarre and inspired designs on screen.

It was therefore a surprise to many of his fans when, in April 1994, the newly-revitalised MGM – the studio that had previously commissioned Giger to work on the ill-fated Poltergeist II – announced the imminent production of Species, a “suspense-filled science fiction thriller”, and that “renowned artist HR Giger” had agreed to conceptualise the title creature. Clearly proud that the Species team – Friday the 13th Parts III-VIII producer Frank Mancuso, Jr and Roger Donaldson, Australian director of No Way Out and The Getaway remake – had managed to persuade him to come aboard the project, MGM president Michael Marcus went on to describe the artist's appointment as “an enormous coup.” So what had persuaded Giger to change his mind about Hollywood?

“Frank Mancuso and Roger Donaldson came to visit me in Switzerland,” he recalls. “I was a little concerned because Donaldson had never made a science fiction or horror film, but I knew Mancuso had made some of the Friday the 13th films and a lot of other good movies, and he promised he would call me every night to tell me how the movie was going, and he kept his word.” Although Mancuso would always call at two or three in the morning, this suited the artist, who keeps almost nocturnal hours. “We had very good exchanges of ideas,” he says, “so that was very nice.” Mancuso further assured him that, while Alien had limited the artist to the traditional 'man-in-a-suit' method of monster-making, Species’ ‘Sil’ would be realised with a combination of actors (both in and out of costume), state-of-the-art computer generated images (CGI) and three-dimensional models, blending the widest possible range of techniques into one (hopefully) seamless structure. “That is the real magic,” Giger says.

By this stage, Giger was already impressed with Dennis Feldman's script. “I liked the fact that at the beginning of the story, the aliens send their DNA to Earth, as if they wanted their children to grow up there,” he says, adding that Sil gave him a welcome opportunity to create, for the first time, an unmistakably female alien, a feminine creature both gorgeous and grotesque – beauty and beast in one – similar to those seen in much of his renowned airbrush work. “I always have to fight to keep the beauty,” he explains, “because people are afraid that if you don't make the monster ugly, with a lot of slime and things like that, it can't be scary. Whereas I have always said that if you [create] a good enough design, it can be both good-looking and horrific, and that the horror can come from the way it moves and what it does, not just the way it looks.”

Echoing his four-stage life-cycle for the Alien creature, Giger also saw Sil's many transformations as an opportunity to conceptualise a number of creatures around a central theme. Giger initially prepared some sketches, but – largely due to his maltreatment on Alien 3 – “not so good that they could build Sil from them!” These early designs were approved, contracts were (eventually) signed and Species moved into a higher gear. By this time, although the studio had invited him to Los Angeles to supervise the puppet representations of his work – an offer he would normally have been delighted with – his mother had, at that time, become very ill, and he was afraid to leave her in case she worsened. As it happened, she died shortly thereafter, “but it was important to me that I was there to hold her hand.”

Meanwhile, to compensate for his missed visit to Hollywood, Giger tried to undertake the puppetry work at home in Switzerland, but found that his assistants did not have enough movie experience to do make the pre-production models satisfactorily. “They were not so brilliant,” he admits with a chuckle. “What can I say? We had a bad time!” Nevertheless, when Mancuso and Donaldson returned to Switzerland to see what Giger had done, they were very pleased. However, the more of Sil's character he created, the more he felt some scenes were not in tune with his depiction of the way she would act. “I had a lot of inventions and a lot of ideas for different things on [Species],” he says, “but they don't like it when I start changing the story!” Among Giger's own ideas for the film was the ‘ghost train dream’, in which the adolescent Sil sees a vision of a grotesque caterpillar-like locomotive. Giger says he was delighted that this scene, which echoes the railway-themed designs Giger had previously explored for aborted films such as Dune and The Train – made it into the final cut. (“It is a little short, but it is there,” he says with a mixture of pride and relief.) Furthermore, the artist received a full 'conceived, designed and fabricated by’ credit for the train, to compliment his main ‘Sil designed by HR Giger’ credit.

Overall, Giger says that his experience working on Species was his best since Alien – although he admits that isn't saying very much. Praising model-turned-actress Natasha Henstridge and director Roger Donaldson (who has since directed the smash hit disaster movie Dante’s Peak), Giger nevertheless suggests that effects company Boss Film Studio’s patchy CGI effects ultimately let down the film’s climax. “Boss Films made the train very good, and also the underwater dream I call the ‘blue shrimp soup’,” he says, “but although [makeup effects artist] Steve Johnson’s model was very good, they couldn’t do the transparent Sil well because it’s very complicated.” Giger was somewhat cheered by Species’ $100 million plus performance at the international box office, but remains sceptical about Hollywood in general. “So many things can make a film kaput – bad cuts, bad lighting, bad dramatisation, bad direction, whatever,” he says philosophically. “At the end, you are only a small thing on the film. That's why every time I work on a film I say it will be the last time.”

True to form, Giger’s next encounter with a major studio was an unhappy one. Shortly after completing his work on Species, the artist was approached by Batman Forever director Joel Schumacher and asked to design a new Batmobile. Immediately setting to work, Giger produced a number of different concepts – winged and skeletal, just like those used in the final movie and credited to production designer Barbara Ling – in his familliar, ‘biomechanical’ style, only to never hear from Warner Bros again. “I did about fifteen designs,” he laments, “but I never got any money and [although] Schumacher told me he would visit me, he never came.” A year later, Giger discovered that his services would not be required for production on the fourth Alien movie, Alien Resurrection, a fact which he describes simply as “disappointing”.

Nevertheless, Giger’s relative satisfaction with the way Species turned out probably explains his initial agreement to participate in the sequel, currently in production and slated for release in mid-May 1998. Directed by Peter Medak (The Krays) from an original screenplay by X-Files scriptwriter Chris Brancato, Species II opens with the successful completion of the first manned mission to Mars by a group of astronauts led by the handsome and charismatic Patrick Ross. Back home, a new ‘Sil’ has been grown in a control experiment designed to reveal possible weaknesses in the life-form in case it should ever return to Earth. However, when the three astronauts return home to a heroes’ welcome, they soon discover that Ross has been infected by the malevolent alien, which is determined to seek out and mate with its female counterpart in order to propogate the species on Earth... The film reunites several of the original Species cast, including Natasha Henstridge, Michael Madsen and Marg Helgenberger, as well as introducing new characters played by Mykelti Williamson (Con Air), Justin Lazard (TV’s Central Park West), Academy Award® nominee James Cromwell (Star Trek: First Contact) and George Dzundza (Crimson Tide).

In a detailed press release earlier this year, MGM announced that Giger would, in collaboration with Steve Johnson once again, design “a new Sil that will be reminiscent of her predecessor ... and will be crafting a second alien, which will be distinct and yet reflect the fact they they have the same origins.” Unfortunately, Giger says that he has since parted company with the project. “The last time, it was great, because Steve Johnson and I did the job together,” he explains. “This time, Steve had in his mind to do his own version [of the creature], and I couldn’t continue because he was engaged first, so he didn’t make me happy!” Giger says that he worked with Johnson for several months, but decided “it made no sense” to proceed further when he realised that the new creature was not his own design. “Steve Johnson is very good,” he adds, “and he said, ‘If you don’t like my work, you don’t have to sign [it] or be responsible for it.’ But I said, ‘It’s not whether I like it or not – it’s not my work, so I can’t say [it was].’ He knows that exactly.” Nevertheless, Giger says that he will probably receive a ‘consultant’ credit on the finished film, and wishes Johnson and the rest of the Species II team well. “I hope it’s still is coming out well, because the director is very good.”

Undeterred by such disappointments, Giger is continuing with a film project of his own, a cinematic adaptation of his own unpublished graphic novel, The Mystery of San Gottardo. Based, intriguingly, on Giger's first ever surrealist sketch – the 'Armbeinda' figure mentioned above – The Mystery of San Gottardo is a bizarre tale set in Switzerland’s Gottard mountains in the 1920s, and featuring as protagonists two leg-and-arm combinations separated from their wheelchair-bound torso/head 'parents' as part of a bizarre ritual inspired by the legendary Mythagora. While Giger has had little success in his attempts to bring this ambirious project to the screen, the storyboards are scheduled to be published next year by Taschen, a popular German publisher noted for its artbooks, and which has already published a number of Giger volumes, including his recent autobiographical work www HR Giger com.

In addition, the artist has a number of other long-gestating projects in the works, including a major Giger museum to be opened in a Swiss castle in the year 2000, and a new volume entitled Giger Under Your Skin, a study of the many people with Giger-inspired tattoos. “They are my living museum,” he says proudly. “My favourite science fiction writer, William Gibson, the author of such books as Necromancer and Mona Lisa Overdrive, immortalised my works as blueprints for tattoo artists in his novel Virtual Light, in a conversation in a tattoo shop in the future. It seems that [in tattooing], the word ‘bio-mechanical’ – a term I coined to describe many of my paintings – has come to represent a futuristic style in which the body is shown as transparent, revealing that we are all robots under the skin,” the artist explains. “I admire and respect the people who wear these tattoos,” he adds. “They are the sincerest fans of my work because they collect for pleasure, not for profit.”

(c) 1997, 2014 David Hughes. All rights reserved.

The Motel Life (★★★★ Empire Review)

2014-03-31T05:55:00.002-07:00

When motel dweller Jerry Lee (Stephen Dorff) is involved in a hit and run, his brother Frank (Emile Hirsch) does his best to soothe Jerry Lee’s wounded soul.

Alt.country singer Willy Vlautin’s songs (with band Richmond Fontaine) were bittersweet, compassionate stories about life’s losers, and his transition to novelist seemed effortless. His first novel, persuasively adapted here by the Polsky brothers (with brilliantly-conceived animated interludes), is the elegiac tale of rootless brothers Frank (Emile Hirsch) and Jerry Lee (Stephen Dorff), whose already hardscrabble existence takes a turn for the worse when Jerry Lee is involved in a hit and run, leaving Frank to pick up the pieces of his brother’s shattered soul. Hirsch and especially Dorff are terrific in a film so downbeat, you may not notice your heart breaking.

VERDICT
Hirsch and especially Dorff shine in this low-key heart-breaker; a more perfect adaptation of Willy Vlautin’s acclaimed debut novel is hard to imagine. ★★★★

Magic Magic (★★★ Empire Review)

2014-03-31T05:48:00.001-07:00

When a troubled young woman (Juno Temple) visits Chile with her cousin Sarah (Browning), her already fragile mind begins to unravel, partly due to the carelessly spiteful antics of Sarah’s friend Brink (Michael Cera).

Mental illness is such a terrifying phenomenon, it’s strange that it isn’t the basis of more psychological horror films. Here, insular Alicia (Juno Temple) suffers what seems to be a mental breakdown while holidaying in the Chilean countryside with her cousin Sarah (Emily Browning), her already fragile mind disturbed by the obnoxious antics of Sarah’s friend Brink (Michael Cera). Temple gives an exceptionally raw performance as the girl with the unravelling psyche, and there are echoes of early Polanski (not to mention cult horror Let’s Scare Jessica to Death), but ultimately Chilean writer-director Sebastián Silva’s neither-fish-nor-fowl narrative plays tricks on our minds, without fully engaging our senses.

VERDICT
Sebastián Silva’s psychological horror pushes many of the right buttons, and Juno Temple is terrific, but the film ultimately delivers less than the sum of its parts. ★★★

Half of a Yellow Sun (★★ Empire Review)

2014-03-31T05:44:00.001-07:00

Nigeria, 1960: A well-educated Nigerian couple (Thandie Newton and Chiwetel Ejiofor) find themselves caught up in the unrest, bloodshed and civil war that followed in the wake of their country’s independence.

Fans of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s prize-winning bestseller, about well-educated Nigerians (Thandie Newton, Ejiofor and Anika Noni Rose) caught up in the chaos and bloodshed of the newly-independent African nation’s civil war, will be disappointed by Nigerian playwright Biyi Bandele’s reductive reading of Adichie’s sweeping novel, set in the 1960s but with themes that resonate from the Sudan to the Congo. Newcomers will be bemused by the clumsy contextualisation and muddled motivation of characters who, robbed of their inner lives by a clunky script, are left floundering amid the melodrama and speak-the-plot dialogue in what amounts to a Radio 4 play with pictures.

VERDICT
Newton and Ejiofor do their best with the stilted dialogue in an unfocussed, muddled and reductive adaptation of a widely-read, much-loved and important novel. ★★

The Double (★★★★ Empire Review)

2014-03-31T05:38:00.001-07:00

The mind of shy office clerk Simon James (Jesse Eisenberg), smitten with a colleague (Mia Wasikowska), begins to unravel when he meets the firm’s newest employee, James Simon – an exact double of himself.

Richard Ayoade may have a doppelganger: can this adaptation of a Fyodor Dostoyevsky novella really be the follow-up to sublime coming-of-age story Submarine, which propelled him from TV nerd-comic to cinema auteur? It appears so – but then, in The Double, very little is what it appears to be. Like vodka, films based on Russian literature tend to improve with filtration, and so Ayoade lifts the premise, and certain satirical elements, from Dostoyevsky’s novella, filtering them through an intoxicating combination of Kafka, Orwell and Gilliam. If Submarine was Ayoade’s Gregory’s Girl, The Double is his Brazil.

In a dingy, bureaucratic office in what seems to be a cruel alternative universe, underpaid and overworked office clerks like Simon James (Jesse Eisenberg) commute to grim, demeaning office jobs, where they punch in and punch out, barely earning enough to pay for their dingy, Eastern Bloc-style apartments. Simon, a nebbish in an ill-fitting suit, is so insignificant he has to prove his identity every day to the officious security guard, and is barely noticed by the pretty colleague he moons over: Hannah (Mia Wasikowska), who works in the copy room (naturally). Simon’s pitiful existence takes a turn for the worse, not to mention the weird, when he meets the firm’s newest employee, James Simon (Eisenberg again), who not only bears a mirror image of his name, but also his exact face. Although physically identical to Simon in every respect – a fact which, as in the novella, no one else seems to notice – Simon’s doppelganger has everything he doesn’t: confidence, charisma, and success at work and success with the opposite sex. But could James’ striking resemblance be a Fight Club-style figment of Simon’s imagination? Or is this doppelganger out to steal Simon’s life?

Despite the disturbing subject matter, Stygian cinematography and sound design straight out of the Berberian Sound Studio, Ayoade underpins everything with his blackly comic sensibility, a sense heightened by a supporting cast that includes Wallace Shawn, Chris O’Dowd and Christopher Morris – not to mention the entire cast of Submarine.

VERDICT
Given the obvious influences on The Double, it could have felt like a facsimile of other films. Instead, it has enough individuality, imagination and idiosyncratic invention to identify it as a true original. ★★★★

Empire On Demand (April 2014)

2014-03-31T04:35:00.000-07:00

IRON MAN 3
Sky Movies
Available Now / 2013 / Cert 12
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang was pretty good, witty in a self-conscious sort of way, but nothing in the last cinematic pairing of writer-director Shane Black and Robert Downey Jr suggested that Black’s threequel would bounce back so emphatically after the disappointing Iron Man 2. Vulnerability suits Downey’s Stark, but even as he hits rock bottom, his natural disposition means that the film never stops entertaining, with Black giving us an unbelievable amount of bang for our buck, and an inspired (if somewhat controversial) rendering of the villainous Mandarin (Ben Kingsley). ★★★★

MIDNIGHT IN PARIS
Amazon Prime Instant Video
Available Now / 2011 / Cert 15
Before Richard Curtis tackled time travel, Woody Allen sent Owen Wilson’s script doctor and aspirant novelist back in time to 1920s Paris, for a delightfully disarming fantasy in which he encounters such literary luminaries as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and T.S. Eliot in the City of Light. ★★★★

THE SQUARE
Netflix
Available Now / 2014 / Cert 15
Revolution is a messy, chaotic and often bloody business, and the Tahrir Square protests that deposed Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak were no different. This stirring, starkly immersive Oscar nominee documents the ‘Arab Spring’ uprising and its bloody aftermath from the point of view of those at ground zero. ★★★★

MONSTERS UNIVERSITY
Sky Movies
Available Now / 2013 / Cert U
Pixar’s ‘When Mike Met Sulley’ prequel is not quite the equal of the studio’s original 2001 monster mash, but there’s fun to be had watching the campus antics of monsters-in-training Mike (Billy Crystal) and Sulley (John Goodman) as they compete in the Scary Games, presided over by a fearsome Dean (Helen Mirren). ★★★★

MITT
Netflix
Available Now / 2014 / Cert TBC
For this Netflix Original about Mormon presidential hopeful Mitt Romney, Greg Whiteley was given unprecedented access to the candidate and his family, from the earliest discussions about his potential candidacy, throughout his run against the incumbent, Barack Obama, all the way to his concession speech in 2012. ★★★

GOOD WILL HUNTING
Netflix
Available Now / 1997 / Cert 15
Then-unknown Matt Damon and Ben Affleck won Oscars for their sensational script about a troubled genius mathematician with mental health issues, but they’re equally on form in the roles they wrote for themselves, with Robin Williams lending memorable support as a psychiatrist with troubles of his own. ★★★★

BEHIND THE CANDELABRA
Amazon Prime Instant Video
Available Now / 2013 / Cert 15
“Too much of a good thing is wonderful,” declared Liberace (Michael Douglas), the subject of Steven Soderbergh’s lavish, HBO-funded portrait of the superstar pianist, seen through the eyes of his live-in lover Scott Thorson (Matt Damon), on whose memoir Richard LaGravanese’s scintillating script is based. ★★★★

TO CATCH A THIEF
Netflix
Available Now / 1955 / Cert PG
Hitchcock was at his most playful in this light, frothy tale of a former jewel thief (Cary Grant), living out his retirement in the French Riviera, who teams up with an oil heiress (a luminous Grace Kelly) to solve a series of cat burglaries of which he is suspected. ★★★★

THE PLACE BEYOND THE PINES
Amazon Prime Instant Video
From December 12th / 2013 / Cert 15
Ryan Gosling smoulders as a fairground stunt rider who robs banks on a motorcycle, putting him on a collision course with a local cop (Bradley Cooper). Despite its small-town setting and small-time characters, Derek Cianfrance’s follow-up to Blue Valentine has a deceptively epic ambition. ★★★★

NEVER SLEEP AGAIN: THE ELM STREET LEGACY
TheHorrorShow.TV
Available Now / 2010 / Cert 12
Horror-only streaming platform The Horror Show’s first documentary is this exhaustive (and, at four hours, exhausting) look back at the Nightmare on Elm Street movies, with Wes Craven, Robert Englund, Heather Langenkamp and Renny Harlin among those on hand to share their memories. ★★★★

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'The Tourist' Season: How "The Greatest Sci-Fi Movie Never Made" Became a Novel – Illegally

2014-03-20T08:00:00.000-07:00

Earlier this month, news began to spread among the science fiction community that one of the greatest sci-fi movies never made had finally appeared – as a novel.

Based on Clair Noto’s notorious 1980 screenplay The Tourist, originally considered as Ridley Scott’s follow-up to Alien, the “novelisation” was written by Lee McGeorge, an author specialising in self-published vampire fiction. Entitled Clair Noto’s The Tourist, but written without Noto’s input or permission, McGeorge’s novelisation was printed in a limited run of paperbacks, and made available as a free download, accompanied by a YouTube video in which the author explains the thinking behind the book. “The Tourist is a story that fans of science fiction have been waiting many years for,” he says. “It began life a screenplay written by Clair Noto and in the 1980s it was the hottest film script in Hollywood; it’s often referred to as one of the greatest movies never made.” McGeorge goes on to outline the story, which concerns a female alien, one of a number of extra-terrestrials living incognito in exile on Earth, seeking the means to return to their homeworld. “It’s a shame that no movie version exists,” he adds, “and I think it’s unlikely that it will be made in its intended form. So what I’ve done is the next best thing, which is to take all of that source material and convert it faithfully into a cleanly-written story.”

Although Noto’s name appears on the cover, and an old picture of the author in the YouTube video, further investigation reveals that the novelisation was written without Noto’s blessing or permission – and the she isn’t happy about it. “Clair is upset about the novelisation,” McGregor admits. “She hasn’t read it, but is aggrieved that (in her mind) people are exploiting her.” Noto’s reaction is hardly surprising. Not only does she claim to have retained the book rights when she sold The Tourist to Universal in 1980, in the intervening years she has seen a number of films that seem to have been lifted from the screenplay. “I think that the Chinatown sequence in Blade Runner was very much influenced by The Tourist,” Noto told me during an interview conducted for my 1999 book The Greatest Sci-Fi Movies Never Made. “I believe [Ridley Scott] even said that to me at one time.” The late Brian Gibson, who was attached to the movie version for years, agreed. “here have been too many movies where people have deliberately, or inadvertently, or coincidentally, used some of The Tourist’s premises. I think it was the resonance of the metaphor – that a whole lot of people live their lives on this planet secretly feeling like aliens – that would have made it a unique movie. But now, because the premise has been begged, borrowed or stolen, the metaphor no longer has that ring of something surprising.”

While it’s true that films as wide-ranging in style and subject matter as Blade Runner, Species, Men in Black and, most recently, Under the Skin, include themes which appeared in Noto’s original story, no one has taken the bold step, or the liberty, of repurposing The Tourist without the permission of the original author or the current rights holder. So how did McGeorge get away with it? “I did it as fan fiction under ‘Creative Commons,’” McGeorge explains, referring to the official means by which creators can grant others permission to create works (such as fan fiction) using elements contained within copyrighted material. “I am a commercial author,” McGeorge adds, referring to his other self-published stories, “but this book is 100% free download with attribution.” Attribution or no, no interpretation of “creative commons” or the widely-abused “fair use” laws allow an author to publish a work of fiction based on an unproduced screenplay, even one as widely read as The Tourist. Otherwise, anyone could write and publish a “novelisation” of, for instance, Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight, claiming “fair use”. McGeorge has a different interpretation.

“[‘Creative Commons’] license is what allows kids to record a cover of their favourite band and upload it to YouTube," McGeorge insists. "I had a 30-year-old project. I wrote a fan fic[tion]. I printed 75 paperbacks and sent some to the original creative, plus Universal. Clair is unhappy, [but] everybody else loved it.” McGeorge believes that if it had been a short story published online, it would have been overlooked, but because he produced a professional-looking paperback, “there was a legal knee-jerk [reaction].” Thus far, however, McGeorge has received no official ‘cease and desist’ from Noto, Universal Pictures, American Zoetrope (which developed the film project for a time with director Franc Roddam), or anyone else connected with the original screenplay. “If somebody claims to be the copyright holder and asks me to stop, then of course I will,” he says. In which case, he adds, “You better download it quick before it’s pulled.”

© David Hughes

Bullet (★★ Empire Review)

2014-03-07T04:55:00.002-08:00

Hard as nails cop Frank Bullet (Danny Trejo) takes the law into his own hands when his grandson is kidnapped by a ruthless drug kingpin (Jonathan Banks).

Prolific DTV director Lyon must have some big cojones to take the title and character name from the Steve McQueen classic, and lend it to this collection of low-grade cop movie clichés, in which cage fighting cop Frank Bullet (Trejo) is out for blood when drug kingpin Carlito Kane (Banks) kidnaps his grandson. Hobbled by lazy plotting and dodgy dialogue – “You’re in America. Speak Mexican, bitch!” – this has little to offer beside the meagre thrill of seeing Trejo square off against fellow Breaking Bad alumnus Banks (aka Mike Ehrmentraut). Maybe one of the 23 other films Trejo has out this year will be better.

VERDICT
It took four writers to come up with this low-grade collection of cop movie clichés, which wastes more talent than Trejo wastes bad guys. ★★

generation Um... (★ Empire Review)

2014-02-26T03:23:00.001-08:00

With a title like that (the Germans suggestively retitled it Threesome), Keanu Reeves would have to be in it – at least, twenty years ago. Today, he looks miscast and miserable – Sad Keanu: The Movie? – as a lost soul who hooks up with two bored New York girls (Adelaide Clemens and Bojana Novakovic), all of them going nowhere existentially, dramatically or cinematically. “Um...” is right: Mark Mann’s film has nothing to say, but takes 90-odd minutes to say it. ★

Bastards, aka Les Salauds (★★ Empire Review)

2014-02-10T06:56:00.001-08:00

A merchant seaman (Vincent Lindon) returns home to France to investigate the causes of his brother-in-law’s suicide. But the more he delves into the mystery, the more unpleasant truths emerge.

Claire Denis, auteur of such acclaimed French films as Beau Travail and White Material, wades into murkier waters with this Stygian revenger’s tragedy, in which a merchant seaman (Vincent Lindon) abandons ship to investigate the reasons behind his brother-in-law’s suicide, and the hospitalization of his troubled niece – then plot the downfall of those responsible. Sadly, the potential for an involving thriller is squandered, along with a talented cast, the fractured chronology feels forced and counter-productive, and the resulting film is so low-key, it’s almost inaudible to the human ear. Bleakness is for its own sake is at best tedious, at worst – as in this case – bordering on the exploitative.

VERDICT
Revenge is a dish best served cold. Denis’ latest is more like undercooked leftovers, with a bitter aftertaste. ★★

Inequality for All (★★★★ Empire Review)

2014-02-03T05:07:00.000-08:00

Documentaries charting America’s post-meltdown economic woes are a dime a dozen, but former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich proves an eloquent engaging host for Jacob Kornbluth’s impassioned account of America’s widening income gap, and its potentially devastating effect on both the middle class and democracy itself, loosely based on Reich’s excellent book Aftershock: The Next Economy and America’s Future. ★★★★

The Armstrong Lie (★★★ Empire Review)

2014-02-03T01:50:00.002-08:00

Four years after a doping scandal derailed his documentary about cancer survivor and competitive cycling champion Lance Armstrong, Alex Gibney recycles his footage for a very different film.

For two decades, cancer survivor and competitive cycling champion Lance Armstrong defied the homily about cheats and prosperity, until a long overdue doping bust destroyed his reputation, stripped him of his Tour de France victories, and derailed Gibney’s documentary, originally set to be about Armstrong’s 2009 comeback. Now, armed with his denial-era interviews and a candid new session with the disgraced athlete, Gibney comes to bury, not praise, yet he arguably soft-pedals the betrayal of millions of cycling fans and Armstrong’s wristband-wearing acolytes. It’s still a complex, confounding tale of moral relativism – if everyone else is doing it, why can’t I? – and institutionalised corruption.

VERDICT
Lance Armstrong is such a liar, his cycling shorts should be on fire. But Gibney never goes in for the kill – heck, he was tougher on Julian Assange. ★★★

Empire On Demand (March 2014)

2014-02-01T01:14:00.000-08:00

Empire's pick of the 10 best movies to download or stream this month.

PICK OF THE MONTH

Stoker (2013), Sky Movies (from February 7th)
Oldboy director Park Chan-wook’s first English language feature is an intoxicating cocktail of psychological horror, slow-burning sexual tension and American Gothic, inspired by Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt. Mia Wasikowska is perfectly cast as the troubled soul whose 18th birthday celebrations are tragically cut short by news that her father has died in a freak accident, an event which presages the arrival of her charming yet sinister ‘Uncle Charlie’ (Matthew Goode). Park wrings every ounce of dark comedy out of the seductively serpentine script, ratcheting up the tension until the thrilling, violent and shocking climax. Spellbinding. ★★★★★

Dirty Wars (2013), Netflix
War correspondent turned documentary filmmaker Jeremy Scahill, a veteran of numerous American conflicts, proves an engaging host as he investigates the role of shady black ops outfit JSOC (Joint Special Operations Command) in dark deeds overseas, in this potent and provocative exposé of America’s secret wars. ★★★★

Fast and Furious 6 (2013), Sky Movies (from February 21st)
Paul Walker’s tragic death last year adds an unintentional poignancy to the fitfully entertaining sixth installment in the fast-moving, furiously successful franchise. The action careens from Moscow to London and Spain, never quite recapturing the magic of the last film, but the vehicular mayhem is impressive. ★★★

Artifact (2013), iTunes
Whatever your feelings about Jared Leto, this documentary about his band Thirty Seconds to Mars’ battle with its record company, EMI, is more expansive than it appears. Anyone interested in how the music business treats recording artists, both before and since the digital download revolution, should take a look. ★★★

I Give It A Year (2013), Lovefilm Instant
Borat and Bruno writer Dan Mazer’s caustic, darkly funny rom-com (with emphasis more on the ‘com’ than the ‘rom’) follows Josh (Rafe Spall) and Nat (Rose Byrne) as they realize that their whirlwind romance might not have been grounds for a successful marriage. ★★★★

Broken (2012), Lovefilm Instant
As the title suggests, the pieces of Rufus Norris’s directorial debut don’t always come together, but the overwrought plotting – a tangle of dysfunctional family dramas in a London suburb – is offset by down-to-earth writing, matter-of-fact direction and pleasingly jumbled editing. ★★★

Oblivion (2013), Sky Movies
Joseph Kosinski’s follow-up to Tron Legacy suffers from John Carter Syndrome, coming across as a patchwork of elements lifted from other works, even if its source preceded its two biggest film antecedents – in this case, Moon and Wall-E. Nevertheless, impressive sci-fi scenery and an intriguing plot hold the interest. ★★★

RoboCop (1987), Netflix
However the remake turns out, we’ll always have Paul Verhoeven’s sardonic and gloriously subversive original, in which a fatally wounded cop Alex Murphy (Peter Weller) is cybernetically upcycled into a corporate crime fighter dubbed. I’d buy that for a dollar (but it’s free to Netflix subscribers). ★★★★

To the Wonder (2012), Lovefilm Instant
Far from “making Tree of Life look like Transformers,” as star Ben Affleck jokingly promised, Terence Malick’s latest has a discernible plotline – after a whirlwind Paris romance, a couple face the reality of life in rural America – even if all the director’s familiar trademarks make it vintage Malick. ★★★★

The Whisperer in Darkness (2011), http://www.TheHorrorShow.TV
Despite countless efforts, no film has really nailed 1920s horror author H.P. Lovecraft’s peculiar brand of dread, suggestion and cosmic grandeur, but this 1930s-style adaptation comes damned close, as hapless Albert Wilmarth (Matt Foyer) uncovers a terrifying conspiracy involving cultists and alien crustaceans. ★★★★

Homefront (★★ Empire Review)

2013-12-05T03:50:00.001-08:00

It’s a promising set-up: after his wife’s death, an ex-DEA agent (Jason Statham, with Cockney accent intact) moves to backwoods Louisiana to raise his daughter, butting heads, fists and baseball bats with a local meth operation run by a sleazebag named ‘Gator’ (James Franco). But despite a passable script (by Oscar nominated screenwriter, uh, Sylvester Stallone) and an intriguing supporting cast – you don’t often see Winona Ryder and Kate Bosworth as skanky tweakers – Fleder’s flabby direction bleeds the life out of it. When you find yourself admiring the scenery in a Jason Statham film, you know you’re in trouble.

VERDICT
The prospect of a Statham film scripted by Stallone may get your pulse racing, but thanks to Gary Fleder’s flabby direction and a woefully miscast James Franco, Homefront is dead on arrival. ★★

Blue Caprice (★★★★ Empire US iPad Review)

2013-10-28T03:59:00.000-07:00

It’s little more than a decade since the infamous Beltway sniper attacks, in which two African-American gunmen targeted random citizens of Washington, D.C., and for many the wounds still feel fresh. So kudos to first-timers R.F.I. Porto (screenwriter) and Alexandre Moors (director), who delve into the background of the shootings with a sensitivity that recalls, and arguably channels, Peter Bogdanovich’s Targets and Gus Van Sant’s Elephant. Isaiah Washington (remember Clockers?) gives one of the year’s best performances as the unhinged father who leads his adopted son to America, and then into his psychotically twisted world – with tragic, terrifying consequences. Chilling. ★★★★

Escape from Tomorrow (★★ Review)

2013-10-28T03:53:00.000-07:00

It’s an ingenious idea: sneak cameras into Disneyworld, and covertly shoot a film in which The Happiest Place on Earth becomes a psychotropic nightmare for an unhinged father of two. Perhaps only a mind such us Tim Burton, David Lynch or Charlie Kaufman could deliver on such a tantalizing promise; Randy Moore’s effort is a noble failure, compromised by some wobbly acting, monochrome photography (Disneyworld in black and white?!) and a lack of follow-up ideas. It would have made a killer early episode of Mad Men; as it is, it's a woefully squandered opportunity, in spite of its ambition. ★★

Deceptive Practice: The Mysteries and Mentors of Ricky Jay (★★★★ Empire US iPad Review)

2013-10-28T03:45:00.000-07:00

If you only know Ricky Jay from David Mamet movies or Deadwood, you’ve a magical treat in store, as Molly Bernstein captures Jay and “his 52 assistants” (an ordinary deck of cards) performing some of the world’s most dazzling tricks. He’s much too modest to have a documentary made about himself, so this fine film covers the history of card tricks and close-up magic, with fascinating footage and hilarious anecdotes – including one about a live chicken, plucked, put to sleep and served at a dinner table, which will have you howling with laughter. ★★★★

Zero Charisma (★★★ Empire US iPad Review)

2013-10-28T03:41:00.001-07:00

Full disclosure: I kicked in a few bucks to help crowd-fund this film, which went on to win the Audience Award at Austin, TX film festival SXSW. Get ready for a tale of dice and men as a blowhard D&D dungeon master (Sam Eidson), who believes The Matrix was ripped off from a short story he wrote in school, becomes threatened when a cool hipster (Garrett Graham) joins his regular roleplaying group. ★★★

Muscle Shoals (★★★★ Empire US iPad Review)

2013-10-26T08:05:00.001-07:00

What strange alchemy turned a humble Alabama shack into one of the greatest recording studios in history, playing host to such classics as Percy Sledge’s “When A Man Loves A Woman”, Wilson Pickett’s “Mustang Sally”, Aretha Franklin’s “R.E.S.P.E.C.T.” and the Stones’ “Brown Sugar”? Sledge, Jagger and Richard, Franklin, Jimmy Cliff, Bono, engineers, musicians, and founder Rick Hall pay tribute to the legendary musicians’ Mecca in this note-perfect documentary. ★★★★