Predator Sequel Director Meeting Schwarzenegger
Talking to Red Carpet News at the London premiere for new 70s set buddy comedy The Nice Guys, Wrier/director Shane Black spoke about his excitement for the upcoming Predator Sequel The Predator. He also hinted that a possible return for original franchise star Arnold Schwarzenegger could be on the cards, with plans to meet for brunch and secret discussions with his former co-star. Video Interview and Transcript below:
Speaking about plans to reboot the Predator franchise and atone for the failings of the various failed spin-offs Shane Black explained:
Well The Preadtor is something I have a history with as well as just being dear to my heart. It was kind of the beginning of my relationship with Hollywood and Joel Silver. In this one we’re just trying to get some excitement and mystery back, in the same way I think Ridley is summoning the spirit of Alien with Prometheus and now the much anticipated prequel. I think Predator has that potential too, to get back to the portent and sense of mystery, some of the power that may have been missing in some of the more modestly budgeted knock offs over the few years intervening. We want to do it more as a film the feels like an event. That’s a challenge and a responsibility I don’t take lightly. Our goal ultimately is that people love this again and they’re aware of it in a way they buy their ticket a month out in advance and they see it like they’d see a summer movie.
As for whether Arnold Schwarzenegger could reprise his iconic role to form a part of the new sequel Black was coy but gave fans significant hope:
Arnie and I have a meeting when we get back to just chat for breakfast… I’m not allowed to talk about what we’ll be talking about… Maybe we’ll just talk about the weather. You don’t know and I’m not going to tell you! But though everything’s still up in the air the train is rolling, it’s left the station on Predator and I couldn’t be more excited!
The Nice Guys Russell Crowe Interview
Russell Crowe sits down in London to talk about The Nice Guys, his brilliant new 1970s set buddy film co-starring Ryan Gosling and directed by genre legend Shane Black.
I guess you can write chemistry in a script but bringing that to life on the screen is different. You and Ryan are wonderful to watch, was it fun to play?
Yeah, you know, you can’t manufacture that, you either have it or you don’t. But the key to it is not that complex, it is just about listening. If you are listening to each other and tuned in it doesn’t matter what left step he takes or improv he is going to do, I can go with him as I haven’t anticipated or made any assumptions, and it goes both ways. That is essentially all you are seeing, a couple of guys who are very aware that the other guy can do anything at any given moment, so you best tune in.
Is that really his Ryan Gosling’s actual scream we hear in the film?
It freaks me out, it is the best scream in feature film since Gene Wilder. That is a hell of a scream.
The on-screen bromance you have with Ryan is great, did you follow the script strictly or was there a lot of improv?
Well, the cool thing about working with Shane at this point of his life where he has had the ups and downs, is that he understands you have to trust who you hire. We were both very respectful of the script and will do it the way it reads but we also brought ideas everyday and said what if we move it like this or that, and Shane trusted that we would work in the spirit of what he intended. There is a lot of stuff improvised on a daily basis and it isn’t discussed, it is just in the movie and you go with it.
We have spoken about the chemistry with Ryan but we also get a reunion of you and Kim after LA Confidential. What was it like to hook up with Kim again?
You have to tread carefully in London!
Maybe hook up wasn’t the right word! (Laughter)
It was great seeing Kim again. We were talking and realised we hadn’t been in the same room together for over a decade, but it is a very different cinematic relationship than before. We had so many hours together on LA Confidential that we had a very intimate friendship and that still remains. That is the funny thing about this business, you can go on a cycle and not see each other for years but if you connected you still connect the next time you see each other, so it was great to see her and all that but a very different work experience this time.
Back to Ryan, was there any problem with corpsing or cracking up between takes?
See, this is great I am in a country where people know what corpsing is, in America they’re like, I have no idea what that is! If you take the 26 years of making lead roles in feature films prior to The Nice Guys, the amount of times I will have corpsed on camera in that whole time, 49, 50 films, whatever, would be less then any given week making Nice Guys. This little b*****d makes me laugh. Sometimes I would suspect he was up all night thinking of a way to make me laugh, he has a natural comedic gift and he is a funny b*****d, so yeah, I laughed my head off all the time. This one scene, we had blocked off the Sunset, very simple shot, we have to come in, do a couple of lines of dialogue then drive away. And Ryan is just not on the script: he is just jamming on some idea that is in his head about German spank films and I am falling apart in the car trying to get my lines out as he goes into the pseudo German he does with such conviction. So he is doing all that and you have Joel Silver standing in the Sunset saying “I have the whole street blocked off to shoot my movie, not tonight guys, not tonight.” So we are sitting in the car and I say to Ryan “so we going to stick to the script” and Ryan says, “no”.
What was it like to work with the younger cast?
We had a sort of joke of Angorie being the most mature person on set. It was kind of a joke but it was kind of real too. She was always prepared, she came ready to give everything. She had very limited experience but a fine intellect and a real enthusiasm for the craft, so it was great. The thing is to get her to that place of comfort, apart from the work Shane did with her, Ryan put a lot of effort into that. A few days ago we were having a chat and I said “I just knew you were going to be a great dad when I saw you do that”. She started to flower because she felt comfortable and could own the space.
Why does your character live where he does?
We thought it was a brilliant idea. We shot a little piece that is not in the movie where he just sits in his apartment deep in thought and you can hear the laughter from the live shows going on downstairs, and over time you see the laughter seep in to him and he then smiles. I don’t know what it meant but it was really cool to shoot. You know he has no friends, no life and you can see his history in that apartment and how it looks.
You mentioned intentionally messing around during an important scene, did that make shooting the film a much longer process?
When did I say one scene? Everyday, every scene, can I make it clearer. If Ryan was here he would say he thought his character was called schmuck because every time we turned around that is what we heard the most from Joel looking at the monitors.
If you do get an opportunity to revisit these characters for a sequel are there things you would like to see in that?
Interesting thing about sequels, it seems every movie I do someone asks in a press conference if there will be a sequel and then it never happens. So now you’ve f*cked it up for everyone! I mean, certainly there is a lot we can do with these characters so it could be fun. For some reason Ryan and I think the title “The Nice Guys Mexican Detectives” is hilarious and I don’t know why!
The Nice Guys Shane Black Interview
Lethal Weapon legend Shane Black sits down in London to talk about his latest 70′s set buddy film The Nice Guys, pairing Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling
So let’s start with how the film came to being made?
For me the sort of bone-deep kind of DNA of this thing started when I raided my father’s bookshelf when I was a kid. I had a friend, Anthony Bagarozzi my writing partner, and together the two of us decided there weren’t enough private eye movies, not enough old-school, tough guy sorts. So we set out to write this movie, sharing characters – which isn’t how you can write a film – and we came up with something over the years that in various variations managed to fall upward, got the right actors and 13 years later you have The Nice Guys. We are actually quite happy with the result.
A lot of the films you’ve made are set at Christmas, The Nice Guys it is set in October, any reason it isn’t set at Christmas?
The idea is, I had various reasons for setting things at Christmas but the one thing I didn’t want to do is keep doing it once people noticed, because it was my little delicious secret and had meaning for me. Then questions like this one…
There are some brilliant surreal moments within the film, specifically the bees. How do you have that first sketch meeting and introduce such a surreal, brilliant concept?
Here is the good news where that is concerned. The pitch consists of a man, Joel Silver, if I can convince him (laughter). He would look at me sometimes and be like, what? But he gets on board and we have a similar sensibility that goes back 30 years. Even after I had done a very successful film, Iron Man 3, afforded an opportunity to do something with it I went back to Joel. Joel who I have enjoyed my best financial, no that’s not true (laughter)…
What was it like to work with the younger cast?
We can’t say enough about this little girl, I confess I have read a few reviews and they mention her. I went to her and said “are you aware of the press you are getting, you stole the movie”, and she said “I haven’t really read…really?” She doesn’t even know she is good, she is just this wonderful, guileless little girl and God bless us we found her when we did.
You have alluded to the fact that if this film is as fantastically successful as we know it should and will be, you have some quite specific ideas for where you might like to take the characters forward?
All I can say, as I have a bit of canoodling to do on that actually, I love this idea of a sort of time-locked franchise, which means it will never catch up to us. So the sequel will be something in the 80s on an issue of that era, so we can throw these guys up against that wall and see what sticks. I think a fun idea is a timeless private eye who proceeds through a series of historical in incidents but will never get to the present day.
Matt Bomer On The Nice Guys Bad Guy
Smoldering star Matt Bomer adds some menacing fun to Shane Black’s 70s era buddy film The Nice Guys, starring alongside Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling. He sat down in London shortly before the film’s European Premiere and revealed how he felt about the role and one of the more shocking moments of his performance.
John Boy is terrifying without saying anything, just in his demeanour. Was that great to bring to life?
Oh yeah, I mean it is always fun to paint with different colours and play these kind of roles you aren’t typically thin-sliced as, and to do it with these people. I am essentially a fan boy who is lucky to be along for the ride. Shane and Joel are a huge part of my cinematic upbringing: to watch two of my favourite actors create this incredible symbiotic comedic performance where one doesn’t work without the other and every take is different, it was just an incredible education for me.
What was it like, to throw a 13 year old girl through a window?
Angorie is such a consummate professional that, you know, it was the first thing I filmed and I had to throw a young girl through a window and I immediately felt the need to ingratiate myself to these young girls, and that I was a parent and it was just pretend and they just stared at me blankly and were like, so? Throw me through the window, what you got? That’s it? I want another take! So yeah, they took me to school.
X-Men: Apocalypse Review
The Plot
With the emergence of the world’s first mutant, Apocalypse (Oscar Isaac), the X-Men must unite to defeat his plans for the extinction of humanity.
The Good
Since 2011’s X-Men: First Class, Fox studios have been working towards, and succeeded in rebooting the mutant comic book franchise with a younger cast and period settings while still very much keeping it all slightly tied in with the original trilogy that arguably kicked off the super hero genre at the turn of the century. With X-Men: Apocalypse, the action is at it’s highest since perhaps The Last Stand. The titular villain, an all powerful mutant who has existed for tens of thousands of years comes out of essentially a really long nap in order to destroy everything around him with the help of his four horsemen, Magneto (Michael Fassbender - returning for the third time) Angel (Ben Hardy), Storm (Alexandra Shipp) and Psylocke (Olivia Munn).
Meanwhile, battling Apocalypse, we get the return of Quicksilver (Evan Peters), Professor X (James McAvoy) and Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) as well as some new members including Sophie Turner and Tye Sheridan as Jean Grey and Cyclops respectively. While the old familiars bring another impressive performance – Evan Peters again gets a scene stealing moment much like the one that won fans over in Days of Future Past – Turner and Sheridan bounce off each other in such a small but powerful way as their on-screen romance begins to present itself. Turner in particular gives one of her greatest performances as the young Jean Grey, even outshining Famke Janssen’s incarnation from the original trilogy.
And with Hugh Jackman’s final turn as Wolverine upcoming, returning writer Simon Kinberg and director Bryan Singer manage to fit in a brilliant tease to whet our appetites for the recently announced R-rated version of Wolverine. It’s a shame his appearance was already given away in the final trailer and not saved for a surprise cameo as First Class managed to do.
The Bad
Unfortunately, Apocalypse manages to slip too easily into the traditional over-use of destruction which is especially disappointing given that the biggest strengths in the two previous films came from the intricate and entertaining storylines. Here however, the plot feels somewhat missing. Apocalypse’s plan doesn’t get enough focus and his intentions are less fleshed out, making him feel like X-Men’s version of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Ultron but worse. Apocalypse is presented as an all powerful mutant yet he still needs four accomplices to help him and spends most of the film dragging us along with him as he collects them.
And though this latest instalment is set in the 1980’s after exploring the 60’s and 70’s in the last two, the setting is not captured as well as it has been before. While there are a couple of nice moments such as the previously mentioned Quicksilver sequence and a small scene which manages to sneak in a Star Wars reference (while also managing to make a knowing dig at the difficulties of third instalments), that’s about all we get for an 80’s feel.
The Ugly Truth
X-Men: Apocalypse reintroduces some fantastic new performances from Sophie Turner’s Jean Grey and Tye Sheridan’s Cyclops and teases the upcoming Wolverine sequel well, but stumbles on its over-use of action and fails to utilise its 80’s setting nor it’s all powerful villain.
Review by Johnny Ellis