You couldn’t ask for a more obvious set-up for a sequel than the end of Kick-Ass. Yet director Matthew Vaughn—who cannily set out to make a $50-million commercial hit—won’t count his chickens until the movie opens on 3000 screens April 16. Lionsgate wants to talk sequel—they have first-look rights. But Vaughn, who has plenty of ideas for how to go about reforming his pint-size killer Hit Girl (Chloe Moretz)—think Terminator 2, with Schwarzenegger’s cyborg assassin shooting folks in the knees—isn’t ready to sit down and make a deal. (See two-part flip-cam interview below.)
Why? Remember the guy’s a producer-turned-director. If your movie opens big, you have more leverage.
And believe me, Vaughn’s entertaining comic-book action spoof—which Lionsgate acquired after footage played well at Comic-Con—will do great box office. Nic Cage, Chloe Moretz, Aaron Johnson, Christopher Mintz-Platz and a surprisingly comedic Mark Strong all carry the movie. But while the SXSW male demo and fanboys love it, critics will be mixed. Lionsgate wants to encourage women to see the film—they say that it tests well for them—but there’s a difference between showing someone a movie and getting them to show up.
Read Moreby Anne Thompson, posted to Festivals, SXSW, Headliners, Nic Cage, Independents, Lionsgate/Roadside, Reviews, Video, Interviews, Writers, Screenwriters on March 16, 2010 at 9:22pm PDT | Permalink | Comments (0)
Michael Gondry is a marvel—and I would have loved a longer chat than this flip-cam quickie, which skates across his SXSW doc The Thorn in the Heart, about his school teacher aunt Suzette, who the family used to visit deep in the country in the summer. He wanted partly to capture a vanishing world.
Gondry also talked about making his video Open Your Heart and working with Seth Rogen and Christoph Waltz in The Green Hornet, which he first wanted to make 13 years ago. Gondry was just starting to talk about his new animated feature Megalomania, a futuristic teen rebel adventure written by Daniel Clowes (Ghost World) as an alternative to the skuttled big-budget Master of Space and Time that never got off the ground at DreamWorks. The animation will be based on designs by Gondry’s son Paul, who is charming in The Thorn in the Heart.
Eugene Hernandez got to ask him more questions during a longer Q & A, in which Gondry revealed more details. Hornet’s Rogen, Steve Buscemi and Juliette Lewis are tagged as voice stars. And The Playlist dragged even more info out of the man about other new projects—details here.
Read Moreby Anne Thompson, posted to Festivals, SXSW, Video, Interviews on March 15, 2010 at 9:59am PDT | Permalink | Comments (0)
Gold Film/Interactive Badge and packet of party tickets in hand, I’m plugged into a power strip in the main courtyard at the Austin Convention Center. (The wi-fi sucks.) On my way downtown, I drove the wrong way onto several one-way streets, including a train track. I am safely parked in the convention lot, which costs $7 a day, but the guy let me in for free when I offered an out-of-state check.
The interactive panels are the most compelling; the interactive/film dynamic is exciting here. I’ll watch some new films, sure, and interview folks along the way, but I have the luxury of knowing that indieWIRE is covering the films like a blanket. Kick-Ass starts things off Friday night; I’ll talk to director Matthew Vaughn tomorrow, and producer Robert Rodriguez is previewing footage from Predators at 10 PM and again tomorrow, with a press conference. I spoke to Rodriguez last night at the Texas Film Hall of Fame; he says Predators is not a remake but more of a reinvention inspired by the title, which is owned by Fox. According to @theplaylist, who has read the script, it’s a sequel set in the same world. Rodriguez shot both Predators and his own Machete at Austin’s thriving Troublemaker Studios, which he founded ten years ago after El Mariachi.
At the Texas Film Hall of Fame, I videoed Rodriguez and talked SXSW with the fest’s Rebecca Feferman and The Dallas/Fort Worth Star-Telegram’s Chris Kelly, on the jump.
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by Anne Thompson, posted to Festivals, SXSW, Video, Interviews on March 12, 2010 at 4:06pm PST | Permalink | Comments (1)
On the red carpet at the Oscars, as Hollywood’s Beautiful People glided by in their Oscar designer duds, a few came over to talk to Jeanne Wolf, the BBC and the In-Style reporter, whose job it was to flag as many people as possible about what they were wearing. I picked up a few of them on the flip cam.
Colin Firth was resplendent in a tuxedo designed by his A Single Man director, Tom Ford:
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by Anne Thompson, posted to Awards, Oscars, Video, Interviews on March 9, 2010 at 4:50pm PST | Permalink | Comments (3)
On the red carpet before his documentary feature Oscar win, The Cove director Louie Psyihoyas previewed some of the things he would try to say on stage—before being played off—and backstage as well.
by Anne Thompson, posted to Awards, Oscars, TV, HBO, Video, Interviews on March 8, 2010 at 3:05pm PST | Permalink | Comments (1)
It was thick and fast on the Oscar red carpet, so rather than take notes, pictures or tweet, I whipped out my handy flip cam:
Academy executive director Bruce Davis talks Oscar top ten, while Antonio Banderas talks about undressing Melanie Griffith:
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by Anne Thompson, posted to Awards, Oscars, Video, Interviews on March 8, 2010 at 3:00pm PST | Permalink | Comments (0)
The thing to remember about Shutter Island is that it’s closely based on the novel by Dennis Lehane. James Cameron collaborator Laeta Kalogridis wrote the adaptation that lured Leonardo DiCaprio and Martin Scorsese. Read the book and you will see how closely she hewed to the original. Whatever the movie’s strengths or weaknesses—and it has both—they come from the book. I’d argue that as cinematic as this paranoid thriller is, it works better as a book than a movie. That’s because Scorsese faced the challenge of making this high-wire reality vs. fiction puzzle into a plausible, believable narrative that didn’t throw the audience for a complete loop. Some buy it, some don’t.
Paramount obviously made the right call pushing the HItchcockian suspenser into February—and selling the movie as a nasty R-rated psycho-thriller. Shutter Island delivered a boffo $40-million weekend, the best ever for both DiCaprio and Scorsese. Earning diverse, mixed reviews (here’s The New Yorker) and a B+ Cinemascore, the question remains how well Shutter Island actually played for audiences. The second weekend will tell the tale.
After initially resisting Hollywood—it took Clint Eastwood calling him on the phone to land Mystic River—Lehane has settled in for a pretty smooth movie ride. “I’m still not sure I’ve capitulated to Hollywood per se,” he says by phone from his native Boston. “My three films were made in odd non-conformist ways within the system.”
Read Moreby Anne Thompson, posted to Directors, Clint Eastwood, Marketing, Reviews, Studios, Paramount, Writers, Critics, Screenwriters on February 24, 2010 at 5:34am PST | Permalink | Comments (3)
Brit author Nick Hornby discovered the Lynn Barber memoir An Education and showed it to his producer wife, Amanda Posey, as a possible movie. He liked it so much he adapted it for the screen himself, something he has avoided doing with his own novels, three of which—High Fidelity, Fever Pitch, About a Boy—have been turned by other writers into damned good Hollywood movies. He did adapt his first novel Fever Pitch into a British movie starring Colin Firth. But otherwise he has kept some distance from Hollywood adaptations of his novels.
Now Hornby’s up for an Oscar for adapting someone else. We talked on the patio of Hollywood’s new W hotel about his Hollywood connection, writing to music, and his next script: an original animated film. The flip cam interview is in four parts.
Part One:
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by Anne Thompson, posted to Awards, Oscars, Video, Interviews, Writers, Screenwriters on February 19, 2010 at 9:55am PST | Permalink | Comments (3)
After the Academy Nominees luncheon Monday at the Beverly Hilton, I repaired downstairs to do a couple of interviews pool side—along with a few other media. I flip-cammed Crazy Heart‘s T Bone Burnett, the tall and famous music supervisor who was instrumental in making the movie as good as it is. First, the movie wouldn’t have been made without him. Burnett told old pal and jam-mate Jeff Bridges that if he would make Scott Cooper’s movie, so would he. Second, Burnett insisted that the movie’s backers raise enough money to do the music properly. The hand-crafted songs that fit Bridges’ Bad Blake persona like a glove are what make Crazy Heart work so well. Burnett brought along songwriter Ryan Bingham, who wrote Oscar best original song front-runner “The Weary Kind.”
Later that night the two performed along with Bridges and Elton John in a tiny jazz club presumably, as tweeted by @chriswillman, filled with Academy members. Unfortunately, if the Academy producers opt out of performing original songs on the Oscar show in favor of film clips, we will all miss out on seeing Bridges perform the song.
by Anne Thompson, posted to Awards, Oscars, Video, Interviews on February 16, 2010 at 1:56pm PST | Permalink | Comments (1)
Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland is almost upon us. The 3-D Disney fantasy opens March 5. The LAT’s Geoff Boucher asks screenwriter Linda Woolverton (The Lion King, Beauty and the Beast) about adapting Lewis Carroll. She based a lot of this “sequel” on The Jabberwocky, one of my favorite poems of all time.
And Johnny Depp talks about playing the Mad Hatter in this featurette:
by Anne Thompson, posted to Directors, Tim Burton, Franchises, Genres, Fantasy, Sequel, Headliners, Johnny Depp, Video, Interviews on February 10, 2010 at 4:04pm PST | Permalink | Comments (1)
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