Like buses, we wait ages for a Frankenstein movie, and then two come along at once. Hot on the heels of del Toro’s classic take, comes writer/director Maggie Gyllenhaal’s reanimation, loosely inspired by James Whales’ 1935 hit, The Bride of Frankenstein. Setting her tale in the year that film dominated the box office (1936) Gyllenhaal reimagines the creation of a partner for ‘Frank’ (Christian Bale) – inexplicably still alive after his Victorian adventures – through a feminist lens, giving her Bride (Jessie Buckley) agency, rage against misogyny and a black, splattered lip that inspires a movement. Placing the action in an era where the media helped define monsters (Bonnie and Clyde references are unavoidable), in a golden age of movies, and in pre-WWII time before conflict created some equality for women gives Gyllenhaal plenty to say about Patriarchal society in a frenzied movie that includes dance numbers, head-stomping violence, numerous attempted sexual assaults and a through-line on the importance of consent. It’s a movie that wants to celebrate disobedient, ungovernable, transgressive, ‘difficult’ women, that strives to be a battle cry for a new generation still locked in a gender battle (yes, there’s a blunt ‘me too’ reference), but doesn’t quite get the disparate pieces to fit together. Like Frank’s patchwork body oozing pus from sewn wounds, The Bride! is an ambitious mess.
Niko Tavernise/Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.
Perhaps the lack of cohesion is down to reported studio meddling, but there’s the possibility of an electrifying film lurking below the scars; Buckley and Bale commit full throttle to a film that plays like the chimera of Dick Tracy and Folie à Deux, Sandy Powell’s beautiful costumes are intriguing in their own right, Hildur Guðnadóttir’s punk-infused score is a banger and there’s a plenty of meta nods to our obsession with beauty, sex and identity. But confusion begins straight out the gate when the first person we’re introduced to is a dead Mary Shelley (Buckley again) addressing the audience to reveal her seminal novel was not the story she really wanted to tell. Rather she’d prefer to weave the tale of Ida, a sex worker for the Chicago mob who Shelley ‘possesses’, making her insolent to a violent gangster and causing her death. Is Ida a construct of Shelley’s imagination, or a real woman haunted by the ghost of a dead novelist? It’s unclear, as is the messaging; Ida rails against the systemic and casual violence towards women yet the film frequently lingers on, and shows that abuse.
Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.
Gender equality is explored in the mad scientist of the piece being a woman (Annette Bening) who agrees to reanimate Ida’s corpse as a mate for lonely, movie-loving Frank, and in a smart detective (Penelope Cruz), a Rosalind Russell clone who is always steps ahead of her male colleague (Peter Sarsgaard). As Ida is reborn as The Bride with no memory of her past and no consideration for societal norms, she questions her identity, is the catalyst for murder and embarks on a cross-country rampage that takes in cinema visits, deb balls and police shootouts – all luridly recounted in the media. ‘Imagine if they got this excited about a lady astronaut,’ a character muses.
Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.
Playing three characters (with two often battling each other inside her body), Buckley is magnetic, making some sense of a woman defined by others and moving through her arc with feral, carnal intensity while Bale aces the loneliness of a unique creature. To watch them howl and stomp is fun in itself, in a film that is certainly visually impressive. But Shelley’s question at the beginning never gets fully or satisfactorily answered; ‘Is this a horror story? A ghost story? Or, most frightening of all, a love story?’ Rather like Ida herself, it’s never entirely sure what it wants to be.
Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.
Words by JANE CROWTHER Pictures courtesy of Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. The Brideis in cinemas now
Photographs & interview by GREG WILLIAMS As told toJANE CROWTHER
2024’s BAFTA Rising Star, Mia McKenna Bruce, meets Greg Williams for a London stroll to talk about how she transformed from child actor to artist.
It’s a bright January day early in the month and a dusting of snow makes the St John’s Wood neighbourhood of London seem magical as I meet Mia McKenna Bruce. She’s currently filming Sam Mendes’ four-film project, The Beatles, an expansive, multi-perspective quadrant of biopics in which Mia plays Ringo Starr’s first wife, Maureen Starkey. It’s not the only project she’s got on the books, as she capitalises on the BAFTA Rising Star Award she received in 2024. I first photographed her there, coming off-stage, award in hand, and she’s booked a run of high-profile roles since.
Originally from Eltham in South-East London, Mia’s family moved to Kent when she was in year eight as her career was originally taking off as a child actor in TV shows such as Tracy Beaker and The Dumping Ground. She looked younger than her years as a kid so could play younger roles with more sophistication than smaller children. She’s 28 now, and mother to a two year-old son, Leo, but confesses that people still assume she’s a teenager. ‘I still get ID-ed for Lemsip,’ she chuckles. ‘Or I’m trying to get my son Calpol, because he’s teething, and they’re like, ‘We need your ID’.’ Her youthful look helped her play the role that put her on the map as an adult actor, playing Tara, a teen tourist in Malaga, who struggles with issues of sexual consent on a girls’ holiday in Molly Manning Walker’s’ How To Have Sex. It was, by turns, a haunting, vulnerable and bubbly performance that got her on the BAFTA Rising Star shortlist.
Since then she’s led the cast of Netflix’s sumptuous adap of Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials, worked opposite Matt Dillon in Claire Denis’ Senegal-set drama Fences (which debuted in Toronto last year) and played Jane Andrews, the former royal aide and dresser for Sarah Ferguson who murdered her partner in mini-series, The Lady (out now).
I ask about receiving the BAFTA. ‘It still blows my mind,’ she says. ‘That moment that you took that photo, I was literally like, ‘I think I’m going to throw up’. I was very happy, very shocked. Getting to have my family there, to see that moment, was probably the best thing about it all. That was so magical.’ When I ask what she puts getting the award down to she gasps, ‘Oh, a glorious question!’ She thinks for a moment. ‘I think I put it down to a lot of perseverance. A lot of rejection, because that feeling of rejection was horrendous for a long time. It was the thing that actually made me go, ‘I really have to just do this’.’
I wonder if there’s a moment she’s most proud of in her career so far. She leans on the studio railings and considers. ‘There’s a shot in How to Have Sex where Sam Bottomley, who plays Paddy, is walking away from Tara, who I play, and he says something over his shoulder. Molly, our wonderful writer-director, told Sam to throw random, horrible things at me. There’s a bit where I think you can just see that it looks like it really cuts me deep. And I really feel proud of that, because it wasn’t something that we planned. In that moment you really saw what the film was about.’
She’s not allowed to discuss the Beatles film but admits it’s ‘a proper ‘pinch me, I can’t believe I’m a part of this’ moment’. She was also pleased to headline Netflix’s most recent binge TV, playing a flapper socialite, Lady Eileen, who must solve a murder mystery at a country house in Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials. ‘What really excited me was that in the 1920s a woman is just constantly being told ‘no, no, no’. It’s pushing those boundaries. Pushing outside the box. Also, I got to learn the Charleston.’ She stops on the pavement to do the famous dance in her high heels. ‘In the snow, in the boots!’ she laughs. This is some dexterity considering she tripped over a carpet on set and broke her foot which meant her equally tiny sister had to be brought in as a body double for some physical scenes. It was a calling card for audiences as Mia teamed up with Martin Freeman’s Superintendent Battle, traded loving barbs with Helena Bonham Carter (playing her onscreen Mum) and raced cars down country lanes in search of the truth.
As it’s chilly we decide to grab a coffee – a latte with oat milk for Mia who describes herself as a coffee addict. ‘It’s a bit of a ‘don’t talk to her until she’s had her coffee’ thing,’ she jests. To be fair, she sounds fun on set if her gaming MO is anything to go by. ‘I’m just a sucker for a game. I always have in my bag, on set, Uno and a mini travel chess board. Because if you’re spending hours in makeup and stuff, it’s really fun to just get to play chess with makeup artists. And a new addition to my games set is Monopoly Deal. And I love bingo. We go down to Romney Sands and play bingo with all the kids, and all of our extended family. It’s great fun.’
Molly [Manning Walker], our wonderful writer-director, told Sam to throw random, horrible things at me. There’s a bit where I think you can just see that it looks like it really cuts me deep. And I really feel proud of that, because it wasn’t something that we planned. In that moment you really saw what the film was about
As someone who’s been working for years as an actor, living away from her family with chaperones as a kid, I’m curious what she thinks about that experience. Would she want her son to follow her path? ‘I wouldn’t want to say no, because obviously I wouldn’t be where I am now if I’d had the journey that I’d had,’ she considers. ‘But it’s not something I would actively encourage him to do. I knew from a very young age that I really, really loved it, and my parents aren’t a part of the industry. They didn’t push me into it, it was fully me driving it – at about seven years old. For as long as I can remember, I thought I would be a ballerina, a dancer. And then there was in the newspaper an audition for an amateur production of Zeusical the Musical in Croydon. I was begging my mum and dad to let me audition. I got in to do this show. And then I ended up doing Billy Elliot in London for two years, which was just a dream come true.’
This is a story that many people can tell, but not every child actor manages to translate their success to an adult career. How did she move from child actor to artist? ‘I was on a show [Tracy Beaker] from the ages of 10 to 18 as a child actor. It was very fast-paced. I learned very much about being on a set. I had absolutely no idea how to approach a character or a script. It meant I didn’t go to drama school. I hardly went to actual school, because I was away filming a lot of the time. So when I left that show at 18, and was auditioning as an adult at 18, I had absolutely no idea. In the room, they’d be like, ‘OK, talk about the character. Talk about the script. Talk about your ideas’. I had no idea. I got into a really bad cycle of putting too much pressure on it, and trying to navigate it myself, and having no real idea. So then I left the industry entirely. I left my agent. I went to Australia. I did a bit of party-party. And I realised that I did love it, but if I loved it enough, I had to put in the work. And so I went into workshops on a Saturday in London and started to learn about the more artistic side of acting. That’s when it started to come into its own for me.’
‘I learned that everyone has a very different way of approaching it. That was actually a huge thing for me, because I’d see other actors on set doing their process, and me thinking, ‘God, if I don’t do that, that means I’m not an actor’. But actually, no, we all have very different ways of doing it. I also learned the best thing is to feel scared, because that used to petrify me. And someone actually said to me in one of these workshops: the feeling of nerves and excitement is actually the same emotion – it’s just the way that you breathe through it. And that was a huge game-changer for me, because now I love feeling nervous, because it’s just excitement. Whereas before that would be crippling for me. I’d get nervous, and I’d get myself in a state, and I’d have panic attacks. But now it’s like: no, excitement and nerves mean that I just care about what I’m doing.’
The acting now comes so naturally to her that she describes not remembering the experience afterwards. ‘I kind of black out when I act, I can’t really remember. People ask, ‘Do you like watching yourself back?’ It’s not that I like watching myself back, but I love seeing stuff back, because I don’t have any real concept of what I just did. It’s not like a conscious thing. I think I had to learn to trust myself with that as well. And working with Molly Manning Walker on How to Have Sex really helped me with that.’
I ask if the dance background helps with that unconsciousness – in using her body as a tool of expression. She shrugs. ‘If I had to go and do a job where I had to do intense dance training beforehand for a role – a ballet dancer or something like that… something like Black Swan would be my absolute dream.’ The snow is falling more heavily now and we decide to head back to the house of one of Mia’s friends to warm up. The cold doesn’t put a dent in Mia’s mood or enthusiasm. She says she’s been likened to the Duracell Bunny. ‘Do you see it? Do you see the resemblance?’ she laughs. In terms of going on and on, I feel she’s set on a long career path…
Photographs & interview by GREG WILLIAMS As told to JANE CROWTHER Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials is on Netflix now The Ladyis on ITVX now The Fence is out later this year Hair and make-up: Caroline Barnes Styling: Cher Coulter c/o A-Frame
If I could have chosen any band in the world to go on tour with, it would have been Radiohead. I regard them as genius level artists and their music has personal meaning to me, they’re also a band who remain fiercely private and rarely grant access. So when Thom Yorke agreed to have me to join them on the Bologna leg of their recent European tour, it was a ‘pinch me’ moment. As a group, their music has appeared in numerous films, and as individuals, both Thom and Jonny Greenwood have created award-nominated soundtracks for cinema (with Jonny recently Oscar-nominated for his One Battle After Another soundscape).
Photograph by Colin Greenwood
Music and movies have always been bedfellows and this issue reflects that symbiosis – not only through Radiohead’s tour, but also through Simone Ashley who invited me to observe her work on her debut album in studios in London and LA (working with Diane Warren who has racked up 17 Oscar nominations). I first heard Simone sing during the Cannes Film Festival a couple of years ago as we sat by the sea and, impressed by what I heard, I’ve dipped in and out of her creative process as she’s shaped her EP – her acting experiences directly informing and complementing the music she’s writing. Music is also alive in my shoot with Mia McKenna-Bruce at Abbey Road Studios, as we discuss her acting journey that has led to her playing Maureen Starkey in Sam Mendes’ upcoming four-film event biopic, The Beatles.
Radiohead memorably featured in Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet and Baz has always been a director with great musicality. His latest film, EPiC, a reimagining of an Elvis Presley live Vegas concert created with unseen footage shows the artistic synergy between film and music. He tells us about that process, while our architecture feature this issue celebrates the Frank Gehry-designed Walt Disney Music Hall in LA, Hollywood’s go-to sonic space.
Elsewhere, my on-set shoot on Crime 101 was a fascinating look at a stacked cast and their different approaches to the work, while a Mayfair walk with last year’s BAFTA Rising Star recipient, David Jonsson, showed the ambition and commitment required to harness a creative career. We stopped in Berkeley Square and it turned out David used to sit on a bench there and dream of being an actor as an 18-year-old kid. I’ve grown to expect such poetic, full-circle moments in my work now and I’m so happy a number of them are in this issue.
Photographs & interview by GREG WILLIAMS As told to JANE CROWTHER
Greg Williams spends three days with one of the world’s biggest and most elusive bands as they play sell-out gigs on their first tour for seven years.
I’m lucky enough to have been backstage a number of times at events, awards shows, gigs and theatre productions, but I felt a particular sense of privilege to join Radiohead on the road for a slice of their 20-date European tour in December last year. Not only because the fiercely private five-piece rarely allow access, but because to attend a Radiohead show – as an audience member or as part of the crew – is almost religious in feeling. No two sets or shows are ever alike and for fans, it’s like going to church to stand in a room with a band that has dominated music for three decades (they’ve been together for 40 years) and have, as individuals, been major players in the creation of music in movies. For me, there’s a sense of communion or seance to be a part of the crowd listening to the artistry of a group of passionate, unique musicians and it’s something I desperately wanted to document.
We’ve never really done stadiums on a regular basis, just one-offs, festivals etc… It’s not really us
I first met Thom Yorke at the Venice Film Festival in 2018 when he’d done the soundtrack to Suspiria. He was at an event in an old palazzo and I saw a really beautiful old mottled mirror in the room with a candle in front of it. I thought for Thom’s look, him reflected in it would be a cool picture. I introduced myself and I told him the idea and that if he would let me take it, I’d show it to him and if he hated it, I’d kill it. He agreed. I took the pictures and he liked them and we arranged to do more the following day (they were later used as publicity for a record he was putting out). The next night we met up at about 1am after finishing with our other commitments and walked around Venice taking photos together. Since then, I shot him as he filmed Paul Thomas Anderson’s ‘one reeler’ Anima for Netflix with his wife, Dajana. My wife, Daisy, and I were guests at their wedding in Sicily. We’ve built a rapport based on trust. So when I heard that Radiohead were on tour, I reached out and asked if I could shadow them for a few dates.
I travelled to Thom’s hotel in Bologna spending the first night playing pool with him and Paul Thomas Anderson, who was hanging out and watching three of their gigs ‘in hiding’ from his press tour for his Jonny Greenwood-scored and Oscar buzzy One Battle After Another. The following morning we drove to the Unipol Arena on the tour bus, through the beautiful, rolling countryside. Thom and Ed O’Brien ride in the bus and choose the set list, while Jonny Greenwood, Philip Selway and Colin Greenwood travel separately to meet at the venue. This time is a crucial part of the tour, picking the set from their extensive catalogue (they’ve rehearsed 64 songs) that fans try to predict online before each gig. Sitting in the working area on the lower floor, Thom and Ed discuss what they played the previous night and how to change the set for the upcoming show. When that’s done, Thom moves upstairs to the sleeping area to nap. Even just a half hour in the bunk helps both focus and creativity. It’s something he does again before the show.
When we arrive at the venue, we are joined by Jonny, Colin and Philip for lunch before soundcheck. The staging for the show is unique; in the round, it has the vibe of a rehearsal space or recording studio. There are cameras everywhere and giant screens that surround the stage at first cocooning the band before lifting high above them, projecting to the crowd. The backstage area where the stage crew and technicians would normally be is instead sub-stage. Unsurprisingly, Radiohead’s soundcheck is a detailed process that takes close to an hour. They’re always moving from instrument to instrument – at one point four different members of the band are on drums. Jonny will move from glockenspiel to keyboard, to a drum, to guitars. He’ll be playing a guitar with a violin bow, Thom might be playing a keyboard or a guitar or a tambourine… Colin has a Leica camera on his amp; he’s a keen and gifted photographer and has a beautiful book of photos of Radiohead, How to Disappear, that I highly recommend.
The process [of writing music] is a messy one either way, If the priority is a vocal, if the priority is a sound, a mood, following the movement of a specific scene… all takes you down a different chaotic path
Once the soundcheck is complete, it’s time for pre-show prep. Backstage, each band member has their own dressing room and routine before they meet up about 20 minutes before the concert. In that time Thom writes new music in his muted-light dressing room – the music comes before the words most of the time apparently. Often he’ll write a song for a while, and then he’ll let it fallow. He might leave it for four months and then come back to it again. ‘The process is a messy one either way,’ Thom explains of writing music. ‘If the priority is a vocal, if the priority is a sound, a mood, following the movement of a specific scene… all takes you down a different chaotic path. Keeping a distance from where the music ends up seems important in film for me… but I’m a novice compared with Jonny obviously. It’s very easy to get too granular about the relationship between what I am watching and how the music falls with it. For someone like me, working in film is a relief sometimes when the vocal is not the centre of things, a way to mess around in the studio and experiment without being specific. For Jonny it is different, he is more skilled and versatile at studying and co-opting different styles and genres of music, which kind of boggles my mind sometimes. Also he’s always experimenting and looking for reasons to use those experiments.’ Next, Thom will have another 30 minute nap before doing an extensive yoga session. He finishes by resting under a blanket and eye mask in deep prep for the show before getting dressed and joining the rest of the band.
The band will hug each other before heading to the stage. Security part the crowd, creating a pathway to the stage to allow them to walk through. And then the sea of fans closes up again. When you’re in the middle you’re in for the whole gig.
Under the stage, the band grab their guitars and check monitors and head up on stage to a colossal roar. Down below stage you never really hear the show that well. You hear a clash of cymbals, some drums, and noise but not much else because the speakers are all pointing away from you. When the band started the encore with Fake Plastic Trees, which is a bit of a number for me personally, I headed out front and took out my earplugs and put down my cameras and just sang my heart out along with 16,000 other fans. There’s something particularly special that you feel watching Radiohead and the fact that you don’t know what you’re going to get; they might play a song they haven’t played for nine years. It feels creative, organic, unique – and in spaces that feel intimate. Apparently 2.2 million people tried to buy tickets to this tour and the average person buys between two to four tickets, so you can do the maths on what they could have made – instead they chose to sell just 400,000 tickets and only play arenas, where the audience is circa 14-22,000, because they want to give that intimacy to the fans that is lost in stadiums where you can play to up to 100,000. ‘We’ve never really done stadiums on a regular basis, just one-offs, festivals etc… It’s not really us,’ Thom shrugs. ‘There is a larger-than-life aspect to the performance that just grinds you down.’
Collectively sharing/playing your work in front of so many people, seeing it through their eyes as well as your own is important obviously… in a lot of ways, you reconnect with something that may have been tortuous to record or finish writing for example, and suddenly it can take on another meaning, become something beyond what you remember
The money doesn’t appear to be the big driver for these shows; it’s creating an experience for the fans. ‘Collectively sharing/playing your work in front of so many people, seeing it through their eyes as well as your own is important obviously… in a lot of ways,’ says Thom. ‘You reconnect with something that may have been tortuous to record or finish writing for example, and suddenly it can take on another meaning, become something beyond what you remember. It’s just a concert, but sometimes it breaks through somehow, more than the sum of the parts. Also playing and singing everyday just kind of loosens you up! Seeing the effect of what you create in this way keeps the fires burning I guess – once the tour is over and you’ve picked yourself back up that is…’
Standing at the top of the arena and looking down into the beacon of stage light at the centre with the crowd ghosting around it reminded me of the pictures from 1930s boxing matches. Leonardo DiCaprio has come out for the show to join PTA and we all leave the afterparty and jump on the tour bus back to the hotel, Jonny Greenwood on form folding paper airplanes out of the day’s setlists and launching them like darts at us all…
Actor, director and screenwriter Danny Huston tells Hollywood Authentic about wild swimming, his favourite tipple at 33,000ft and what he hears his dad telling him…
How important is a little bit of nonsense now and then to you? Nonsense keeps me alive, keeps things light-hearted. It is an artistry of sorts; it’s the spoonful of sugar that helps the bitter medicine of life a little more palatable.
What, if anything, makes you believe in magic? The unseen. When something happens that has a majesty that makes one be utterly spellbound by the magic of it all. Magic is the things that we don’t see, but we feel. Gravity is magical. A moment on screen is magical. Shadows and shapes can become magical. A twist of fate. The magical look in somebody’s eyes. Magic is everywhere. It is all around us. It is the sleight of the hand.
What was your last act of true cowardice? I don’t consider myself a coward. But a few weeks ago, on New Year’s Eve, I hesitated jumping into the Irish Sea. There were a couple of hundred mad Irishmen who went into it ahead of me, so I couldn’t back down. And it was absolutely glorious, completely rebooted me. So those cowardly moments are really there to test us, and to make us jump into the unknown – in this case, the rather cold but yet welcoming Celtic Sea.
Do you have any odd habits or rituals? I have a few rituals – one a Bloody Mary, spicy, extra lemon when I’m on a long flight. Usually when the plane has reached about 33,000ft of altitude. Nothing like it.
What is your party trick? Pulling a coin out of someone’s ear.
What is your mantra? Howl at the moon like a mangy old dog. Helps me keep connected to the cosmos. I have a few internal, repetitious voices that I suppose are mantras. One is inhabited by my father, and he just basically says, ‘You can do it, kid. You can do it.’
What is your favourite smell? That sharp, cool breeze that skims over the sea, gently lifting the salt. The intoxicating smell of jasmine on a summer’s night. Coffee. Cigars. A good red wine. The smell of the ocean mixed with suntan oil. A freshly cut lawn. To name a few….
What do you always carry with you? I’m ashamed to say. My phone.
What is your guilty pleasure? Dark bitter chocolate with nuts. Playing backgammon deep into the night with my nephew. That is a shared guilty pleasure.
Who is the silliest person you know? My nephew.
What would be your least favourite way to die? A long, endless fart performed in front of all of my family. That would be a rather embarrassing last gasp of sorts. And of course, some terrible execution. The guillotine would be a tense expectation to have.
What’s your idea of heaven? My idea of heaven would be having no fear, no regrets, no anxiety. Lifted somewhere in a stage of blissful joy. Celebrating a world without war, poverty or illness. A blissful, happy, somewhat light state of suspension. Floating ever so gently through space and time.
Danny Huston made his acting debut at the age of 12 in The ‘Human’ Factor and later went onto star in projects as varied as Birth, 21 Grams, The Aviator, The Constant Gardener, Wonder Woman and Stan & Oli. On TV he’s appeared in Masters Of Sex, American Horror Story, Succession and Yellowstone. His father, John Huston, produced his feature-length directorial debut Mr North, with Danny going on to direct The Maddening and The Last Photograph. On stage, he appeared in The Kid Stays in the Picture on the West End. He recently appeared in the rebooted The Naked Gun.
Photographs by GREG WILLIAMS
*Arguably one of the most memorable (and quotable) scenes in 1971’s Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory is when Mr Salt mumbles, ‘It’s a lot of nonsense,’ to which Wonka replies, in a sing-song voice, ‘A little nonsense now and then is relished by the wisest men.’
Photographs by GREG WILLIAMS Interview by JANE CROWTHER
Greg Williams joins the team creating an LA story on set in the heart of Beverly Hills as writer-director Bart Layton explains how his heist movie, Crime 101, takes its inspiration from classic Hollywood and the harsh realities of La-La.
When Greg Williams meets the cast and crew of Crime 101 at the iconic Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Beverly Hills to capture the shooting of a new thriller for Amazon Studios, the building reverberates with classic Hollywood memories onscreen as well as off. ‘I think we were down the road with the Beverly Wilshire when someone mentioned that that was the Pretty Woman location,’ admits Brit writer-director Bart Layton. ‘I was also watching Beverly Hills Cop, and they use it there as well.’
I think a lot of what I wanted to do was have a big movie experience where it does feel like it can be a really enjoyable, fun night out. But also the characters and the storyline all exist within this world that we all inhabit. You want a real ripping yarn but once the super-structure is put in place, it gives you this ability to talk about other things
Though his choice of location was unintentional, his aim to create something of a throwback movie with the original story of an LA criminal (Chris Hemsworth) robbing jewel couriers at points along the city’s arterial highway, the 101, was not. As Hemsworth’s robber works the gems, a cop (Mark Ruffalo) trails him, a HNW insurance broker (Halle Berry) crosses paths with him, a mercurial competitor (Barry Keoghan) challenges him, and a young woman (Monica Barbaro) crashes – literally – into him. ‘It felt like there weren’t many of those kinds of movies being offered up in theatres with a big, fancy cast,’ Layton says of his inspiration for the intersecting stories, name checking Cassavetes’ The Killing of a Chinese Bookie as a cinematic touchstone. ‘I think a lot of what I wanted to do was have a big movie experience where it does feel like it can be a really enjoyable, fun night out. But also the characters and the storyline all exist within this world that we all inhabit. You want a real ripping yarn but once the super-structure is put in place, it gives you this ability to talk about other things.’
The framework of a heist movie allows Layton to explore themes of wealth disparity, inequality, sexism, homelessness and status anxiety. ‘It’s certainly not something that’s limited to LA, but there is something very unique about that town where what you have, and what you drive, and how you look, and youth and beauty and money, is really the currency. There’s also a recurring theme of: what are you doing for yourself? Versus what are you doing for the opinion of other people? LA is a place where you can end up getting a little off-track if you’re not careful by focusing on spending your life doing things for the benefit of how other people will see you, and that will give you some sense of self-worth and some value.’
Thrumming throughout the film – like a blood vessel – is the eponymous 101; used as a get-away, seen from high rise offices, heard from low-income housing and seen as a red-and-white artery of head and tail lights. ‘Aside from the Beverly Wilshire, I wanted to film in places that weren’t frequently seen, to get the full spectrum, a bit of the underbelly. There is a topographical separation in LA. If you are the wealthiest of the wealthy, you physically live further above sea level, so we wanted to represent that a little bit. Each of the characters inhabited their own landscape of different materials and textures.’
While looking for locations, Layton confesses he used some of his experiences in the final script to add authenticity. ‘A lot of what was written into the character that Tate Donovan plays [of a multi-millionaire] was actually inspired by when we were scouting all of these mansions. We would find these guys nutting about in these mansions in amazing locations above the city, with these extraordinary art collections that were a complete hodgepodge. They were just valuable. So I wrote that in.’
There were places where I was probably referencing William Friedkin – To Live and Die in LA and The French Connection. Billy Friedkin saw American Animals, and then I got summoned to his house, which I was obviously never going to not do, because he is a big inspiration and a hero
He placed Ruffalo’s cop in the Valley, created high-end jewellers in Calabasas after scouting trips, and based a harrowing jewellery robbery on research trips to real-life family-owned businesses Downtown and chats with gem couriers. His research helped create a tapestry of the have and have-not stratas in the City of Angels. ‘In the 45 minutes that a 9- or 10-carat diamond takes to go from Downtown to Calabasas or Santa Barbara, it may increase in its sellable value by 500% or 600%. Because I come from a documentary background, I’m constantly looking at: how can I get whatever there is, whatever the texture of the real world is – how can we borrow that, or steal it, or leave the door open for it? Believe it or not, there are people who do the job that Chris does in the film. And there are a few of them in prison!’
Also key to creating a convincing world was casting the right actor to play an inscrutable, methodical robber who’s driven by his childhood experiences. He sent the script to Hemsworth and the two got together to chat. ‘I said, “It’s not going to be a flawless hero…” And the more I said about this character being real the more he was excited by that. So we were both on the same page. So then for me the challenge was: can I find a way not to lose any of his incredible star power and magnetism, but to still find a way for him to be real.’
The writer-director wrote a role for his American Animals star, Barry Keoghan, creating a trigger-happy antithesis to Hemsworth’s clinical pragmatist, and met with Halle Berry for the role of Sharon, an insurance broker who can’t break the glass ceiling at work. ‘She said, “I don’t just know Sharon. I am her,”’ Layton recalls, writing around her during shooting, adding aspects that played into her own experience.
Though the filmmaker says that writing and directing his first full fiction film was ‘out of his comfort zone’ and ‘a big leap’, he felt confident he could essay heart-in-mouth chase sequences skidding through LA neighbourhoods after a masterclass from a pro. ‘There were places where I was probably referencing William Friedkin – To Live and Die in LA and The French Connection. Billy Friedkin saw American Animals, and then I got summoned to his house, which I was obviously never going to not do, because he is a big inspiration and a hero. We talked about how he did those [chase scenes]. So this was just taking that and having a bigger train set than I’d ever had to play with before.’
Again, the conversation returns to the pleasure of creating an original story in an industry often dominated by established IP – even if Layton has pitted Thor against The Hulk in putting Hemsworth and Ruffalo on-screen together as adversaries. He laughs. ‘It’s good for everyone to have more choice. I feel like we should all have more of that in the cinema…’
Photographs by GREG WILLIAMS Interview by JANE CROWTHER Crime 101 is in cinemas now
Writer-director Edgar Wright delves into the operatic teenage tragedy and universal cruelty that powers Brian De Palma’s masterful Stephen King adap.
CARRIE (1976) Brian De Palma’s Carrie is my favourite Stephen King film adaptation. It is, of course, also the first published Stephen King novel and the first screen adaptation of his work. But that doesn’t mean that subsequent adaptations weren’t just as brilliant. There are many films of King’s work that I truly adore – two of my favourites were both directed by the recently, and very sadly, departed Rob Reiner. And yet Carrie remains intensely powerful, not just in the canon of King adaptations, but in how it touches something elemental. It’s a film that feels both very personal to me and, ironically, to almost everyone.
I’ve sometimes described Carrie in a slightly flippant way as ‘the Grease of horror movies’. Both films are about the high-school experience. Both establish cliques: the cool kids, the bullies, the outsiders. Both deal with the anxieties of teenage sexuality, humiliation, desire and the desperate need to belong. Such experiences translate across cultures. Even growing up outside the USA and not having had the ‘high school’ experience, I could still understand exactly what Grease and Carrie were showing me about adolescence and social cruelty. It’s sadly universal and hauntingly relatable.
But there’s another part of that analogy that gets closer to why Carrie means so much to me. The film is not a musical, but it is symphonic in its emotional scale. De Palma, at his very best here, takes raw, painful emotions and elevates them into something heightened, something almost mythic. If Grease is pop operetta, then Carrie is the film equivalent of a teenage tragedy ballad, or ‘death disc’. (The fact that it’s also scored by Italian composer Pino Donnagio, who, before his melancholic film scores, had international hits with melodramatic pop, is the blood-red icing on the cake.)
United Artists/Amazon MGM Studios
A better comparison to Carrie might actually be Robert Wise’s West Side Story. Both films centre on teenage tragedy. Both explore nascent, but forbidden, love weighed down by forces far larger than the people involved: the social systems, the peer pressure, the inherited cruelty. They mix romance and violence, sexuality and fear, innocence and brutality. They capture that volatile hormonal intensity of adolescence, where emotions feel life-or-death. They capture something that’s both deeply empathetic and deeply frightening.
Carrie tells the story of a bullied outcast. Sissy Spacek plays the titular Carrie White, a shy, socially isolated teenager raised by a fiercely religious mother whose warped beliefs have left her utterly unprepared for the world. This upbringing manifests brutally in the film’s opening, when Carrie is humiliated in the school shower by her classmates as she experiences her first period. She doesn’t understand what’s happening to her body. Blood runs down her legs, and instead of help, she’s met with cruelty, thrown tampons and echoing laughter.
That moment of humiliation, combined with her lack of understanding that she is simply becoming a woman, is the catalyst that sets everything in motion. It’s a harrowing opening sequence because it feels so horribly plausible. It feels real.
Unbeknownst to Carrie, this trauma also unlocks something else. Since childhood, she has possessed latent telekinetic powers; the ability to move objects with her mind. This ‘gift’ is not presented as a fantasy, but as an extension of her emotional state.
United Artists/Amazon MGM Studios
The bullying escalates. The girls responsible are punished with detention, but one of them, Chris Hargensen (played with delicious nastiness by Nancy Allen), receives a harsher penalty: she’s banned from attending the prom. That punishment breeds resentment that curdles into something far worse. What follows is one of the cruelest setups in film history, the plan to humiliate Carrie on, for a teenager, the grandest possible stage: the high-school prom. (Even as a Brit, one can understand the enormity of this occasion).
Carrie is paired with Tommy Ross, the archetypal golden-haired high-school prince, and manoeuvred into becoming prom queen. Suspended above the dance floor is a bucket of pig’s blood, waiting to fall. The blood is a deliberate echo of the shower scene, the narrative closing in on itself as humiliation becomes spectacle.
And here is where Carrie does something extraordinary. For a fleeting moment, hope briefly flickers.
Tommy, initially pressured into taking Carrie by his girlfriend Sue, who is unaware of the true brutality of the prank, begins to genuinely connect with her. Against her mother’s furious objections, Carrie attends the prom and gives herself a makeover, blossoming into the beautiful young woman the world has never seen.
When Carrie and Tommy slow-dance together, De Palma’s camera circles them in a hypnotic 360. And something strange happens for me every time I watch it. Much like the midpoint of Titanic, I get the whimsical notion that maybe this time things will turn out differently. Maybe the iceberg won’t be hit. Maybe the cruelty will stop here.
In theory, you could change the film here, leave the cinema, or stop the tape, and invent your own ending, one where Carrie gets to have this happiness. Because what follows is devastating.
United Artists/Amazon MGM Studios
When Carrie and Tommy are announced as Prom King and Queen, Donaggio’s magnificently sinister ‘Bucket of Blood’ cue begins, and there’s an inexorable feeling of dread. The euphoria of Carrie and Tommy’s dance is replaced by the sickening knowledge that public degradation is inevitable. De Palma’s camera cranes with Carrie and Tommy as they take the stage, then travels upward along the rope to the bucket of pig’s blood hanging precariously above them. As an audience member, you’re caught in an intoxicating mix of emotions. On one hand, you desperately don’t want the blood to fall. Carrie doesn’t deserve any of this. She’s been tortured enough throughout the film, and the idea of taking away this perfect moment feels almost unbearable. And yet, the horror-movie fan in you, and the part of you that has fully sympathised with Carrie as a bullied teenager, also wants to see her unleash apocalyptic revenge. And boy, does she.
When Carrie wreaks revenge, she does so spectacularly. De Palma uses every cinematic trick at his disposal: harsh red lighting, split-screen, slow motion, fractured lenses, and the disorienting sea of voices inside Carrie’s head confirming what her mother warned her all along: ‘They’re all going to laugh at you.’
There are several moments in this sequence that give me goosebumps. Sometimes an image from a favourite film is burned into your brain, even if it only appears on screen for a second.
United Artists/Amazon MGM Studios
One of those is the horrifically beautiful shot of the prom backdrop bursting into flames behind Carrie White. I’d seen that image in an old copy of Starburst magazine a good 10 years before I was old enough to see Carrie, and even after poring over those pages for hours, seeing it in motion was breathtaking.
Another devastating element of this climax is that Carrie’s vengeance is so all-consuming that it doesn’t just claim the guilty. Perfectly innocent people, including those who tried to help her, are swept up in the maelstrom of her telekinetic vengeance and die horribly. Everyone in the high-school gym dies except Sue Snell. And even she isn’t truly spared. She’s left with the haunting final shock of Carrie’s hand bursting from the grave, a moment ripped off so many times that its power is taken for granted.
Sue survives, but the memory of Carrie will ruin her forever.
I love that it isn’t clean or black-and-white in its morality, or in its treatment of revenge. And it makes you complicit too, a horror film where you actively want to see the violence unleashed.
In most horror films, your sympathy lies with characters you don’t want to see die. In Halloween, Jamie Lee Curtis, the quintessential final girl, is such a warm presence that you’re invested in Michael Myers not killing her. In Carrie, the audience is primed in a very different way. After watching this girl endure relentless cruelty, you don’t just want to see her destruction of the prom, you crave it.
All of these elements make De Palma’s film feel like even more than the sum of its exceptional parts. It’s pure cinematic opera in every sense of the word: visually, musically and emotionally.
A modern classic that has come to define 21st-century LA, this musical monument to one of Hollywood’s most ambitious producers is an audio and visual masterwork; a striking feat of design embraced by the music community and the movies.
Hollywood Authentic reflects on the genius that inspired the Walt Disney Concert Hall – ‘the light of the Hollywood dream’.
How long does it take for a building to become a landmark? The Walt Disney Concert Hall in Bunker Hill makes the case that it can happen instantaneously, even if the journey to the opening wasn’t always smooth. Standing as a monument to two giants in their respective fields – pioneering filmmaker Walt Disney and exuberantly ambitious architect Frank Gehry – the venue, which is home to the LA Philharmonic, was conceived as ‘a living room for the city’. That contradiction between welcoming accessibility and imposing achievement defines Disney and Gehry. Both made magic that sprung from pencil sketches.
To see Gehry’s squiggly starting point for the Concert Hall, it’s almost impossible to fathom what it turned into. There’s a deconstructivist spirit to the gleaming surfaces that make up the striking exterior of the building, which remains open to interpretation. Do you see a futuristic spaceship with sails, or loose, billowing music sheets, or something else entirely? It’s an invitation to imagination, the building’s clean visual sweep belying the technical rigour required to bring it to life when it first opened in 2003. Even if you’ve never been – and a reported four million visitors flocked there within the first three years of opening – you’ve certainly seen its sleek lines in one of its many TV and film appearances. But it wasn’t all plain sailing…
The project began in earnest in 1987, with a $50m donation from Walt’s widow, Lillian Disney, which she bestowed on the Los Angeles Music Center (Lillian would die 10 years later, before the hall was completed). It was a tribute to Walt’s passion for the arts, and music in particular – classical music was central to so many of his animated works, not least the Silly Symphony shorts and his 1940 opus Fantasia, which synchronised classical pieces with shorts of varied animation styles. As Walt’s work made entertainment accessible for all, so would the Concert Hall.
Finding the architect was the first step, and Gehry was eventually chosen as the longlist was whittled down to one (other contenders had included architecture giants Hans Hollein, Gottfried Böhm and James Stirling). Canadian-American Gehry was one of the biggest names in the business at the time, and worked on the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao over a similar time period (though the Spanish building would be completed first, and its shiny metallic finish would eventually inspire the Concert Hall).
After landing the appointment, Gehry visited the Berliner Philharmonie concert hall, staying in the city for a week and attending every concert. The feeling of intimacy that architect Hans Scharoun had achieved was inspiring to Gehry, who described the German as ‘a master of people-feeling architecture’. The Walt Disney Concert Hall took the best part of two decades to come together, and there was a period of a couple of years from 1994 where construction stalled entirely, thanks to a runaway budget and reported internal feuding, before it got back on track in 1996, with help from numerous benefactors; many are named on the sweeping tiled wall inside, and the curved staircase is named in honour of film composer Henry Mancini.
Gehry had originally planned to have the Concert Hall finished in stone, which he believed would glow at night. But budgetary concerns twinned with the success of Bilbao made the now iconic metal finish inevitable. Gehry leaned on Dassault Systèmes’ CATIA (Computer-Aided Three-Dimensional Interactive Application) to translate the design into practical plans for contractors. Such VFX tech was necessary to bring his idea into reality; every stainless steel panel used is a unique shape. To avoid the need for rivets, 3M’s VHB Tape – a kind of super, double-sided tape also used on aircraft – held the panels in place.
When it opened in 2003 – at a total cost of $274m – it became an instant classic (despite some protests over the spending given the city’s poor and homeless population). A review in the New York Times called the Concert Hall ‘a French curve in a city of T squares’, evocatively describing it as ‘the light of the Hollywood dream’. Yes, some of the panels needed to be sanded down as they were creating too much glare for drivers and overheating some nearby apartments, but it’s no surprise that film stars and movie fans have flocked to the location.
Among its notable screen appearances, the Walt Disney Concert Hall is also the setting for a swanky event ahead of the climax of 2008’s Iron Man. Where else for genius, billionaire, playboy, philanthropist Tony Stark? In the same year, it was also featured in a pivotal sequence in spy comedy Get Smart, starring Steve Carell and Anne Hathaway, who are at the venue to stop a bomb threat against the president (James Caan), who’s attending a concert. ‘It’s the crown jewel of LA,’ Get Smart’s location manager Kokayi Ampah said of using it in the film. ‘It says you’re in LA.’
The project began in earnest in 1987, with a $50m donation from Walt’s widow Lillian Disney, which she bestowed on the Los Angeles Music Center
The Concert Hall also provided near-future vibes for Spike Jonze’s prescient AI-companion romance Her, as Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix) and Samantha (voiced by Scarlett Johansson) people-watch, and Marion Cotillard’s tortured soprano had a residency there in outlandish musical Annette. It received the ultimate decree of pop-culture status with a parody on The Simpsons (featuring a cameo from Gehry himself).
But perhaps its most apt onscreen use was in Joe Wright’s The Soloist, which told the true story of Nathaniel Ayers (Jamie Foxx), a gifted cellist who develops schizophrenia and becomes homeless, before finding a path back via journalist Steve Lopez (Robert Downey Jr.). Because, for all the cinematic showiness of the building’s exterior, it is first and foremost a music venue, and while those sweeping curves continue inside, the wooden surfaces – which glow almost gold – add to a cosy, inviting space.
The acoustics were baked into the design of the building as a priority. Gehry broke away from the conventional ‘shoebox’ layout for a concert hall, to have the seating in the round. While this seating makes it slightly more awkward for visitors to file into, Gehry said that ‘the payoff is incredible’, that the musicians felt more connected to the audience, and vice versa. Testing the sound on a scale model and working with acousticians Yasuhisa Toyota and his predecessor Minoru Nagata, to ensure that there was not a bad seat in the house when it came to sound. With the sound reflection offered by the Douglas fir panelling, there’s no need for audio amplification for any of the 2,265 seats.
A focal point of the hall is the 6,134-pipe organ that Gehry designed in conjunction with organ designer and builder Manuel J. Rosales. The pipes are referred to as French fries for the way they poke out irregularly, in a riposte to the anticipated formality of such an instrument. It’s another fun personal touch in a venue where everything feels generously considered, from the lobby’s ‘trees’ (wood-clad metal beams) to the lily fountain that can be found in the Blue Ribbon Garden. The latter was a tribute to Lillian Disney from Gehry, who instructed Tomas Osinki to build the smooth, wavy structure from thousands of mosaic fragments created from specially acquired Royal Delft Blue porcelain. Gehry had said at the time of completion that he saw the Concert Hall as a ‘kind of flower’ to Lillian, and that expression finds fitting form in this graceful marvel.
Gehry died in December 2025, leaving behind an incredible legacy. Like Walt Disney, Gehry was an innovator who brought art and imagination to the masses. It’s fitting that his most iconic work pays tribute to a fellow trailblazer, and like Walt’s work it will continue to entertain and inspire.
Photographs by MARIO DE LOPEZ Words by MATT MAYTUM The Walt Disney Music Hall 111 S Grand Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90012 www.laphil.com
Greg Williams takes pause to consider the bigger picture on images seen small on his social media. This issue: The Best Actor winners at the 96th Academy Awards ceremony.
I was shooting stage-side at the Academy Awards and Cillian Murphy had just won Best Actor for Oppenheimer – and he’d been awarded by former winners of the category Nic Cage, Matthew McConaughey, Sir Ben Kingsley, Brendan Fraser and Forest Whitaker. They had come off stage together and, soon after, the show moved onto the Best Director category, which Christopher Nolan was nominated in. Cillian had first come over to see who was winning Best Director, and then all the other actors lined up alongside him to observe the announcement from the wings. It wasn’t set up in any way, this was just how they landed. It’s one of those very rare circumstances where everything is just given to you – you’ve just got to put yourself in the right place. There was nothing set up about it; it’s absolutely an observed picture and I’m in no way participating in it. I love it because they’re almost standing like Academy Awards in this very straight up position, their hands clasped in front of them, unconsciously uniform. It was one of the big pics I got of the night and I think really speaks to the reverence that is reserved for winning an Oscar.
