DISPATCH: GEORGE CLOONEY & BRAD PITT WOLFS Words by JANE CROWTHER Photographs by GREG WILLIAMS
George Clooney and Brad Pitt have been working together since they first made Ocean’s Eleven in 2001 – sharing credits in the 23 years since on Confessions Of A Dangerous Mind, Ocean’s Twelve and Thirteen and Burn After Reading. And the off-screen friends were looking for another opportunity to re-team when they were pitched Jon Watts’ original script, Wolfs. The story of two ‘lone wolf’ fixers who are assigned to the same clean-up job when a DA’s dalliance with a young man ends in accidental death, the comedy-actioner premiered at the Venice Film Festival to a standing ovation. Greg Williams traveled with the duo by boat as they attended a press conference and the premiere on Venice’s Lido.
‘We kind of figured there’s gotta be a good reason to get back in a film together, something we feel like we could build upon what we’ve done before,’ Pitt told journalists when he and Clooney discussed the project without their director who had caught Covid on the journey to the floating city. ‘But also, I gotta say, as I get older, working with the people that I just really enjoy spending time with has really become important to me.’
Pitt recalled that both he and Clooney immediately liked the first draft that Watts wrote and pitched to them, and was pleased that the verve of it was retained throughout production to filming in New York. ‘It’s never happened where someone presents you with an idea and you get a first draft of the script and that’s what you end up shooting.’
As grouchy hitmen, Clooney and Pitt banter and squabble throughout a long night where they try to unravel a conspiracy – and their teasing affection was on display when they sat down for their press conference and, later, boogied to Sade’s ‘Smooth Operator’ (a key track in the film) as the credits rolled in the Sala Grande. ‘There’s nothing good about it… It’s all a disaster,’ Clooney joked when asked about working with his 60-year-old friend. ‘He’s 74 and he’s lucky at this age to be still working!’
Wolfs is in select cinemas and available to stream on Apple TV+ now Read our review of Wolfshere
‘Britain is an island off Europe, Orkney is an island off Britain, Westray is an island off Orkney, Papay is an island off Westray…’ says Rona of the remote place she returns to in pursuit of rehabilitation in Nora Fingscheidt’s gorgeous, wild and meditative adaptation of Amy Liptrot’s 2016 addiction memoir. The Orkney-bred daughter of English parents (Stephen Dillane and Saskia Reeves), Rona has escaped the far-flung rock of her birth to Hackney for a biology degree and bacchanalian partying – which has tipped from hedonism to fiending. Booze has loosened her and allowed for city adventures and a romance with a doe-eyed boyfriend Paapa Essiedu, but it has also tightened its grip around her, making her a mean drunk as well as the victim of blackouts and violence at the hands of strangers. In Fingscheidt’s time-hopping poem to the forces of nature, the determination of survivors and the beauty of myth, Saoirse Ronan delivers a career-best performance that is unvarnished, brutal and, ultimately, beautiful and life-affirming.
Orkney and tiny island, Papay, are showcased to their full craggy, unforgiving majesty as Rona returns home from London, hoping that escape from the trigger will help her recovery. In flashbacks we unpick the moments that have led to this reckoning on the windswept ‘outrun’ of her father’s sheep farm. The slurred self-harm, the endangerment, the abuse of friends’ goodwill, the shame of nipping at hidden bottles of vodka in the bathroom with the tap on. Rona also narrates key memories and Orkney myths of monsters that have formed her. As she helps birth lambs, struggles to befriend other young people and spits vitriol at her religious mum, she also recalls the mental health episodes of her father and the estrangement from the boy she loved. Like the endangered Corncrake birds she attempts to track for the RSPB, her sobriety is an elusive, fragile thing and her path to the discovery of both turns out to be surprising.
Adapted by Fingscheidt and Liptrot, The Outrun is a bewitching celebration of healing with different timelines deftly denoted by Ronan’s dyed hair and bolstered by moments of stop-motion, still photography and nature footage (curious seals, boiling seas, raging storms). When lensing Rona’s drunken walks home, Fingscheidt employs woozy, disorientating focus to put us right inside the bottle with her, while at other times the camera is a serene watcher as Rona takes a wild swim in a briny bay. Equally multi-discipline is Ronan, toggling from utterly convincing messy drunk to shattered alcoholic, lost recoverer to flame-haired ‘selkie’ at one with the landscape. Her interior life is so easily read, whether it’s the way she lies to her professor, the apology she weepingly offers her mum or the way a tear of wonder slides from her eye as she watches the twinkle of the international space station pass across the Scottish heavens. The experience of watching her within this maelstrom of a movie is a visceral one, and should power her into the awards ring. A kind and essential movie for anyone trying to find the contours of their true self in a time of difficulty.
Words by JANE CROWTHER The Outrun is in cinemas now
Those who experienced 2022’s Danish horror of the same name may not wish to revisit the particular trauma of that movie, taking in mutilation, social discomfort and a bleakness that snatched breath. A disquieting hit at Sundance, Speak No Evil pitched a Danish couple against a Dutch couple – leveraging middle-class politeness to devastating effect. Now writer/director James Watkins recasts and re-sets the tale in Britain under the Blumhouse shingle, with a reserved American couple, Louise and Ben (Mackenzie Davis and Scoot McNairy), meeting a brash Brit duo, Paddy and Ciara (James McAvoy and Aisling Franciosi), on holiday in Tuscany. Both pairs have kids of a similar age and though they probably wouldn’t usually gel as friends, an alliance is formed and invites to weekends in the country are extended post-vacation. Despite Louise’s misgivings, the American family travels to a rustic farmhouse where Paddy flips from gregarious host to seething bully and back, and the kids discover something terrible in the basement…
To discuss specifics of the horror is to spoil the experience of an incremental discomfort for audiences as social niceties are tested to the limit. At what point, Watkins asks throughout, would YOU say something? What inappropriate action, unpleasant comment, disregard of personal values would be the tipping point to cast judgement? As Paddy and Ciara display boorish, cruel and ultimately sinister behaviour, Louise and Ben are forced to confront the unspoken trauma hidden in their own marriage, as well as question their liberal credentials.
That tonal tightrope rests on the performance of Paddy, here essayed by McAvoy, bringing all his charming and venal charisma to the role – delightfully chummy one minute, a savage the next. It’s a monstrously entertaining turn in his hands and one that makes a revised ending work despite softening the nihilism and inhumanity of the original. It also allows more agency for Davies, playing a spikier version of the first film’s fussy wife, a woman who can, and will, bring her own barbarity to the fore when required. As a brisk, assured social horror (with plenty of vengeful tool use) Speak No Evil is a satisfying scare. But those that can bear the terrible sadness and appalling use of secateurs, should also seek out Christian Tafdrup’s urtext version. And hug your children twice as hard after watching either…
Words by JANE CROWTHER Speak No Evilis in cinemas now
DISPATCH: JENNA ORTEGA BEETLEJUICE BEETLEJUICE Words by JANE CROWTHER Photographs by GREG WILLIAMS
With the Venice Film Festival marking the move of summer into Autumn, it’s perhaps fitting that a Halloween movie opened the 81st festivities. Thirty five years after Beetlejuice was first released, its sequel reunited the original cast alongside Jenna Ortega on the Lido’s red carpet – something director Tim Burton had never envisaged for a film he admits he doesn’t quite understand the success of. A quirky horror comedy starring Michael Keaton as a potty-mouthed, green-haired ghost who haunts the Deetz family when they move into a new house, it was the film that made a star of Winona Ryder (aged 15 when she filmed) and cemented a decades-long collaborative process between Burton and his two leads.
In the years since, Beetlejuice has become a cult classic and after the success of other legacy sequels such as Top Gun Maverick and Ghostbusters: Afterlife it was only a matter of time before ‘The Juice’ returned to haunted audiences anew. And on a balmy August evening Greg Williams joined the cast pre-premiere at their Venetian hotel as the film received warm reviews from critics tickled by the return to practical effects, a Ryder-Keaton re-run, Ortega’s snarky charm and the daft fun of Burton’s distinct signature touch.
‘Over the past few years, I got a little bit disillusioned with the movie industry, I sort of lost myself,’ the director admitted to journalists earlier in the day. ‘For me, I realized the only way to be a success is that I have to love doing it. For this one, I just enjoyed and loved making it.’ For Burton that meant working with Ryder, Keaton and Catherine O’Hara again. Having worked with Burton on other projects, Ryder felt safe to step into a new story with the director again. ‘My love and trust for Tim runs so deep and there was a sense of a certain playfulness and readiness to try things,’ she said, confessing that one of her favourite things about returning to the role of Lydia Deetz – not a TV medium and mother to a teenage daughter – was staring into Keaton’s eyes again. ‘It had been such a special experience the first one and just to be able to come back to it was just a dream come true.’
Burton calls Beetlejuice Beetlejuice ‘a weird family movie’ that examines the rifts between parents and children as Lydia returns to her original haunted house after the death of her father. Her teen daughter, Astrid, may not believe her mum can see dead people but she soon changes her mind after a run-in with a ghost and the afterlife. Burton credits some of his creative rejuvenation to making the first season of Wednesday with Jenna Ortega so she seemed the natural choice for the role of Astrid. Ortega – whose red-carpet custom Dior dress nodded to Lydia’s wedding dress in the original film – has had a similar fast rise to fame as Ryder and the two women bonded immediately on set, not only as mother and daughter but as actors who have become emo icons of their generation. ‘The way Winona and I got on was quite weird,’ Ortega says. ‘It was like we could read each other’s minds a little bit.’ Ryder was, she says, immediately warm and welcoming. ‘It was at a time where my career was taking a different turn. I didn’t realize that I needed that from somebody who could relate, but I did.’
Also along for the ride are Willem Dafoe as an afterlife detective who used to be an actor on a TV cop show, Monica Bellucci as Delores, a long-dead vamp with unfinished business with Beetlejuice; and Justin Theroux as Lydia’s odious boyfriend and manager.
Burton also brought SFX guru Neil Scanlon onto the project to ensure that the low-fi, fast and fun ethos of the first film was resurrected – so just like the original, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice features tactile practical effects to add to the comedy and off-kilter vibe (the waiting room is rammed with ridiculous deaths via piranha, chimney, cats, sharks and hotdogs). The result, says Burton, is a movie very much in the spirit of the original and ‘a very simple emotional movie’ – one that gained a standing ovation post-premiere. ‘The Juice’ is very much loose.
The juice is, once again, loose. Tim Burton returns to his 1988 horror-comedy for the opening of this year’s Venice Film Festival for unapologetic fan service and warm-fuzzies. Having admitted to becoming disillusioned with the film industry before deciding to revisit the ‘ghost with the most’, Burton throws all of his trademark quirks into a movie that features cameos, wacky needledrops, stop-motion and tactile practical effects to nostalgic effect.
Catching up with Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder, complete with goth chopped fringe) decades after she first met so-called bio-exorcist, Beetlejuice, as a teen, this legacy sequel from the producer behind Top Gun Maverick, mines audience affection for the weird and wonderful original by lovingly repeating the journey. So TV psycho Lydia is called back to the New England haven of Winter River when her father dies (in an animated, comedic fashion) along with her step-mom (Catherine O’Hara), cynical teen daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega) and odious boyfriend/manager, Rory (Justin Theroux). Lydia and Astrid have a strained relationship, not least because Mom’s slimy romantic interest is always trying to be a ‘dope dad’ figure, but their familial bonds are put to the test when Astrid meets a local boy and when Beetlejuice’s past comes back to haunt him – forcing him to plague the Deetz family again. Along for the helter-skelter ride are Willem Dafoe’s Neitherworld detective, Monica Bellucci’s corpse bride and an army of shrunken headed minions led by tremulous ‘Bob’…
Keaton and Ryder seem to have hardly aged since the original and fall back easily into step with him growling fourth-wall-breaking Beetlejuice one-liners and her looking delightfully bewildered. While the script may not seem quite as subversive as its predecessor, the film really takes flight when logic is abandoned and frivolity is honoured. Keaton literally spilling his sloppy guts, sucking influencers into their phones and making the entire cast sing and dance to Richard Harris’ bonkers 1968 single Macarthur Park (and yes, an oozing, green-iced cake is present) is a hoot, a couple of segments featuring stop-motion Saturn sand worms tickle and a daft character death genuinely upsets (the film is dedicated to their demise). Fans wanting more of the waiting room get it – plus a built-out ever-after universe featuring dry cleaners, immigration halls, subway stations and call centres inhabited by people who have died ridiculously. There’s disco dancing, a Richard Marx nod, a disquieting offspring and a goofy ending that leaves room for more. Might we want another visitation? If it’s brisk, disposable, self-aware silliness like this, then we’ll likely take a ticket and get in line.
Words by JANE CROWTHER Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is in cinemas now
DISPATCH: KEVIN COSTNER HORIZON: AN AMERICAN SAGA – CHAPTER 2 Words by JANE CROWTHER Photographs by GREG WILLIAMS
Kevin Costner wasn’t meant to be in Venice. The original release plan for Chapter 2 of his sweeping Western series, Horizon: An American Saga meant that the actor/director would not have been able to attend the film festival in the floating city. But like all things Costner seems able to manifest, the release date changed and festival director Alberto Barbera asked the Californian to bring his epic oater to Venice where Costner was mobbed by fans during a standing ovation at the premiere.
‘It’s been a perfect experience, really,’ Costner tells Hollywood Authentic of the way things turned out, not least because he brought his 17 year-old son, Cayden, along for the ride. The four days the duo spent at the festival turned out to be a teaching moment about the nature of resilience and the ability to get things done despite roadblocks. ‘He’s seen me labour over the course of this movie. For his entire life he’s known that I’ve talked about this thing,’ Costner says of his son. ‘And then to see me not let go of the opportunity, and the hope of it, and to actually go out and make two of them – he was able to see the culmination of that. It’s a weird thing when you look at your dad, I think, and see suddenly this movie playing, and the people standing and clapping for it. I think, maybe, he saw something in not letting go of a dream, and that you keep pushing.’
It’s a drive and self belief that makes him something of a pioneer in the wild west that is the Hollywood studio system… ‘I don’t see that correlation because there’s people that hide behind corporation momentum, and look at numbers,’ he says. ‘They wouldn’t survive out in the West. That’s a whole other corporate mentality that allows you to be cutthroat.’ Costner, who plays lone gunslinger and cowboy Hayes Ellison in the films seems cut from the same cloth as his character; a resourceful man who has a definite destination in mind. ‘Maybe my individualism is what you’re looking at,’ Costner acquiesces, ‘and then I’m kind of a unicorn in my own business, by using my money. I don’t like doing that. I don’t want to do that. I don’t even know why I do that. But when I do, I do a lot of sharing of work that could be revisited and revisited. And I certainly think Horizon qualifies as that because I promise you: if you watch it a second and a third and a fourth time, you will see something new.’
Hollywood, and Costner’s fans, await to see if the unicorn manifests chapters three and four of his saga. Our bet is that he will…
Costner certainly has form in not letting go of dreams – his 1990 revisionist western Dances With Wolves was considered a folly by critics yet the actor pressed on and saw the film a crowning success which went on to win seven Oscars. The same is true of Horizon – a saga Costner has long imagined as an epic four-parter and put his own cash into when studios didn’t share his vision. He’s made two chapters of the tale with plans to continue filming three and four later this year. ‘I don’t fall out of love that easily,’ Costner laughs of his decades-long drive to make the movie he dreamt of. ‘I don’t pretend to be the last say on this subject. I don’t try to be a person who’s trying to reinvent the western. I just simply want to go at it historically, and apply human behaviour to the themes that I think tell the story.’
Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 2 will be released later this year Read our review here
DISPATCH: KODI SMIT-MCPHEE DISCLAIMER Words by JANE CROWTHER Photographs by GREG WILLIAMS
‘I should have stayed in my seat,’ Kodi Smit-Mcphee smiles when he recalls premiering Alfonso Cuarón’s new Apple+ limited series Disclaimer on the Venice Film Festival red carpet directly before the premiere of Maria, in which he also stars. In Disclaimer, based on Renee Knight‘s 2015 bestseller, Cate Blanchett plays an award-winning documentary filmmaker, Catherine Ravenscroft, who’s past comes back to haunt her when she receives a novel in the post. Told via three different perspectives and two different time periods, Smit-Mcphee plays the directionless son she shares with Sasha Baron Cohen. In Pablo Larrain’s biopic of Maria Callas starring Angelina Jolie, he appears as the personification of her sedative medication who manifests as a TV reporter questioning her in the week of her life. ‘’I’m literally named Mandrax, which is this suppressant kind of medication that she takes. It’s these therapeutic conversations that she’s ultimately having with her subconscious – but with me,’ he tells Hollywood Authentic when we sit down overlooking the Grand Canal in the St Regis Hotel. Both projects gave him the opportunity to work closely with powerhouse actors in Blanchett and Jolie. ‘It was great in the sense of just how generous and giving and safe and comforting these women are. I really feel like both took me under their wing, and made me feel welcomed and good. And a couple of Angelina’s sons were also on set. So I hung out with them quite a bit. They were really beautiful as well.’
Venice hosted two red carpets for the premiere of the seven-part Disclaimer – the cast photographed on both occasions by Greg Williams – and for Smit-Mcphee coming to Venice gave the actor the chance to spend time with co-stars he didn’t meet during filming as their characters’ timelines didn’t cross on-screen. He and Leila Geroge, who plays the younger Catherine, and Louis Partridge – who essays a young man who has a life-changing impact on her – compared notes on filming as Smit-Mcphee spent six months filming on sets in London (and adopting an English accent) while George and Partridge filmed for seven weeks in Italy.
For George the role required the actor to play two very different versions of the character as well as perform key explicit scenes with Partridge. The part required her to go to some dark place. ‘I use music quite a lot for when I have to shift into another place emotionally. Different playlists for different things, and that just immediately triggers something for me,’ she says. And the intimate scenes were an additional challenge. ‘It’s really important, of course, to have an intimacy coordinator so that everyone feels that there’s someone that they can go to, and feel safe. So there’s that side of it – the technical side of it. The other side of it is just getting to know [Partridge], and feeling safe with the person as a friend. We had so much time in Italy before we did those scenes. We’d go to each other’s trailers before we’d do something like that, and be like, ‘How are you feeling about the day?’ Communication and check-ins. And then just being able to let it go. Just leave it behind.’
‘It was kind of like a dance. It was all rehearsed,’ Partridge agrees. ‘And so, in some ways, it was more helpful to be in your own space, and occasionally checking in. Because we knew what we were about to do. And then, at the end of the day, we’d have a little dance, and shake it all off.’
Smit-Phee laughs that he enjoyed digging into playing a ‘grubby, homebody kind of teen’ as Blanchett and Baron Cohen’s son. As for working with Blanchett as his mum, he says: ‘Cate makes you question your abilities in the best way because she can go from this beautiful, light-hearted, joking fun in between takes. But then when she needs to go into something dark and heavier, it’s almost as if there’s a switch. But of course, there’s not a switch. It’s a great deal of work she does to develop these characters and get into these moments. But, my God, it looks like magic.’
The resulting work in Disclaimer is ‘so powerful’ and will prompt important conversation, says Partridge. He’s just completed work on Noah Baumbach’s new film and is currently filming Guinness, the story of the stout dynasty, playing Edward Guinness. ‘It’s brilliant, I’m loving it,’ he enthuses. ‘Do I get a lifetime’s supply of Guinness now? It wasn’t in my contract. That was a mistake, perhaps…’
Disclaimer premieres on Apple TV+ on 11 October Read our review of Disclaimerhere
