Total Film - July 2023

THE WORLD’S MOST TRUSTED FILM REVIEWS EXCLUSIVE! ‘Kick-ass action? Always!’ GAL GADOT WONDER WOMAN GOES BOND IN…

JAMES MOTTRAM @JAMESMOTTRAM TOTALFILM.COM MATT MAYTUM @MATTMAYTUM Chatted all things Chevalier with Kelvin Harrison Jr. and Lucy Boynton for the TF podcast. Sporting blue hair, black nail varnish and shades (indoors), Kelvin looked nothing like his courtly character. DEPUTY EDITOR JULY 2023 | TOTAL FILM | 3 CALL SHEET THIS ISSUE’S EXTRAS And… ACTION! We love a breath-snatching, gobsmacking, spine-tingling moment in a kick-ass film when a stunt sequence stuns, and this issue we’re celebrating the men and women behind the scenes making the stars look balletic, kinetic and hardcore. I sat down with Gal Gadot to talk about her new spy actioner, Heart of Stone, and heard how her stunt team put her through the wringer. We also get a masterclass from the Mission: Impossible crew on making a banger of a heartquickener, share an inside look on action-packed Ahsoka, and count down the greatest stunts of all time. (Let us know if you think we missed a corker.) Thankfully no ice baths or arnica required for reading about all this, so get stuck in… JANE CROWTHER, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF @JANEVGCROWTHER Enjoy the issue! Welcome to This will be my last appearance until issue 343, as I’m taking parental leave. Teasers will be in the capable hands of Jamie Graham, so if the entire section turns into horror previews, you know why. JORDAN FARLEY @JORDANFARLEY NEWS EDITOR I enjoyed getting into a hearty dissection of the word ‘feminism’ with Sally Potter this month – and having a snoop around her music room where she composes. ANNA SMITH @ANNASMITHJOURNO CONTRIBUTOR When I sat down to chat with Rob Savage we bonded over wearing horror shirts. Even though mine was a subtle Halloween one, he noticed it straight away! EMILY MURRAY @E M I LY VM U RR AY ONLINE ENTERTAINMENT EDITOR Loved chatting to Jason Schwartzman, an actor so humble he couldn’t believe that he was our TF Interview this month. But with Asteroid City, Across the Spider-Verse, et al, this is his moment. CONTRIBUTING EDITOR LEILA LATIF @LEILA _LATIF CONTRIBUTING EDITOR I spoke to Juel Taylor about They Cloned Tyrone the day after the Succession finale and we agreed Alexander Skarsgård wasn’t actually sending Ebba frozen pints of blood: ‘He was playing Shiv the whole time.’

TEASERS 7 CANNES The must-sees from this year’s fest, from Scorsese to How to Have Sex. 10 PEDRO PASCAL The Mando of the hour is gearing up for Gladiator 2. 11 HAUNTED MANSION A peek behind the doors of the Disney do-over. 14 BLUE BEETLE The makers of DC’s new prospect on getting into the bug leagues. 16 THE LL WORD New column! Our Leila tackles cinema’s hottest topics, starting with the Hollywood writers’ strike. 20 THEY CLONED TYRONE Boyega, Foxx and Parris in a directorial debut that demands repeat viewing. 29 SALLY POTTER The Brit-auteur on making movies and music. TOTAL FILM BUFF 96 IS IT BOLLOCKS? Those ‘rip out the drip’ scenes in movies: cannula really believe them? 97 10 OF THE BEST Train crashes! Featuring all the action greats: James Bond, Buster Keaton, Thomas the Tank Engine. 99 GOLDEN GRAHAMS Our Jamie’s back with a new column celebrating underrated classics. 100 TAKING STOCK Cinema’s shiftiest lawyers. THIS ISSUE 30 HEART OF STONE Gal Gadot goes from Wonder Woman to super spy in a new female-led franchise-starter. Total Film chats exclusively to the star plus Jamie Dornan, Alia Bhatt and more. Call it a deep-cover story… 42 25 GREATEST STUNTS They risk life and limb to entertain you, month after month. And that’s mxvw#rxu#vwdļ/#zkr#kdlo# flqhpdġv#Ľqhvw#sk|vlfdo# feats, alongside insight from the fall guys and gals in the heart of the danger zone. 48 MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – DEAD RECKONING PT 1 Christopher McQuarrie and co reveal how they make all those big-ticket thrills and spills possible. 56 AHSOKA The Padawan strikes back in her own Star Wars show. Everything is Dawson… 62 TALK TO ME TF communes with the talents behind the spirited Aussie horror breakout. EVERY ISSUE 3 EDITOR’S LETTER Plus an avalanche of A-list anecdotage from the team. 66 TOTAL FILM INTERVIEW Jason Schwartzman on Wes Anderson, Star Wars skits and working with Uncle Francis. 112 DIALOGUE Into the reader-verse. GAL POWER A franchise-friendly, female-led spy thriller to rival 007 et al is on its way 30 SCAN TO GET OUR WEEKLY NEWSLETTER #339 JULY 2023 4 | TOTAL FILM | JULY 2023 SUBSCRIBE AT WWW.TOTALFILM.COM/SUBS

SCREEN 76 INDIANA JONES AND THE DIAL OF DESTINY Please let him say the line, ‘It’s not the years, honey, it’s the dial-age.’ 78 ASTEROID CITY Wes Anderson’s latest seemingly stars everyone bar, ironically, The Rock. 79 THE DEEPEST BREATH Freediving documentary well worth paying for. 80 SMOKING CAUSES COUGHING Tobacco-themed superteam comedy. Not featuring the Phlegm-ing Torch. 81 TRANSFORMERS: RISE OF THE BEASTS The battling ’bots go into Maximal overdrive. 82 ELEMENTAL Does Pixar’s new toon make the earth move? 84 THE FLASH You wanna read a write-up? Let’s read a write-up. 86 SPIDER-MAN: ACROSS THE SPIDER-VERSE Happily, our reviewer delivered on time; no ‘Spot ate my homework’ excuses. 88 RE-RELEASES Cruise, Chaplin, JCVD and some cult VHS titles on Blu (static lines not included). 90 CLASSIC TV Remembering the super (Season 1, anyway) Heroes. 91 EXTRAS Duck-osaurs, Bat-Lego… plus Jabba goes Pop! 92 SOUNDTRACKS Can anything match the ’96 Mission: Impossible score? 94 BOOKS Tune-ing up BttF. 56 66 76 48 7 ‘I WANTED TO CREATE A MOVIE THAT IS GLOBAL, ON A LARGE SCOPE…’ TOTALFILM.COM JULY 2023 | TOTAL FILM | 5

IN THE CANNES A) KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON Based on David Grann’s 2017 non-fiction book of the same name, Martin Scorsese’s western (yes, he’s finally made it) delves deep into manifest destiny, greed, racism, neocolonialism and misogyny in a rich, immersive masterclass that braids together the interests of his past projects. Faith, persecution, racketeering, entitlement, the corrupting influence of money, the disposability of life… all are present in a nailed-on awards magnet that might be some of the best work we’ve ever seen from all involved. Set in early 1920s Oklahoma, the story centres on Mollie (Lily Gladstone), a young Osage Nation woman and the hugely wealthy owner of headrights (the inherited mineral rights to oil-rich Osage County) – no wonder lascivious white men such as feckless WW1 returnee Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) eye her with avarice. A tribal generation is being eradicated and stolen from via widespread conspiracy and murder – a movement spearheaded by Robert De Niro’s local white ‘saviour’, William ‘King’ Hale. Torn between faithfulness to her beau and terror at the devastation happening on her own lands, Mollie hopes that authorities outside of the complicit local cops might be able to stop the killing of people and culture. Weaving the Tulsa race riots, the KKK and the Masons into its tapestry, Scorsese’s opus questions the misdeeds of America in the last century while linking them to the pressing issues of today. Addressing racial violence, nationalism, the continued epidemic of missing and murdered indigenous women and even our lurid obsession with true crime, Killers of the Flower Moon paints a robust picture of a moment CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2023 The seven must-see films from this year’s world cinema showcase. JULY 2023 | TOTAL FILM | 7 EDITED BY JORDAN FARLEY @JORDANFARLEY

E) THE ZONE OF INTEREST A decade on from Under the Skin, British director Jonathan Glazer roared back with The Zone of Interest, a deeply disquieting, expressionistic look at the Holocaust. Loosely based on the 2014 novel by Martin Amis – who, poignantly, passed away on the day of the premiere – the film follows Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), the commandant of Auschwitz, who lives with his wife, Hedwig (Sandra Hüller), in domestic bliss in a wellappointed home by the notorious concentration camp. Glazer’s astonishing use of sound design and Mica Levi’s unsettling score express the horrors of what is happening, literally, over the garden wall. Glazer won the Grand Jury prize, but really, this staggering achievement was Palme d’Or worthy. F) THE BOOK OF SOLUTIONS Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) returned with this hilarious peak behind the filmmaking curtain. Inspired by the meltdown he had making 2013’s Mood Indigo, Gondry’s film casts Pierre Niney as Marc Becker, an egodriven director who kidnaps his own pretentious-looking film during a fraught post-production. Relocating to his aunt’s house in the French countryside, Becker takes his long-suffering assistant (Frankie Wallach) and editor (Blanche Gardin) with him as he tries to carve out a work of genius. Eccentric, energetic and enlivened by a manic Niney, it may not quite touch the towering Living in Oblivion as far as behind-the-camera movies go, but it captures well the punishing insanity it takes to get a film made. G) FALLEN LEAVES Finland’s master-of-the-deadpan, Aki Kaurismäki, hinted at his retirement after 2017’s The Other Side of Hope. But thankfully he had a change of heart, delivering this tragi-comic miniaturepiece that, at 81 minutes, was one of the most succinct and satisfying films in Cannes. Winner of the Jury prize, Fallen Leaves is a love story between two lonely Helsinki souls – supermarket employee Ansa (Alma Pöysti) and Holappa (Jussi Vatanen), a functioning alcoholic who works on a construction site. Rendered with Kaurismäki’s trademark mix of tragedy and comedy, fate almost gets in the way, but there’s an undeniable sweetness to the story – including a visit to the cinema to see Kaurismäki’s old friend Jim Jarmusch’s zombie comedy The Dead Don’t Die. Delicious. JANE CROWTHER/RAFA SALES ROSS/ JAMES MOTTRAM in history that invites viewer introspection. As Ernest asks portentously when reading from a book on Osage history: ‘Can you see the wolves in this picture?’ Well, can you? B) ANATOMY OF A FALL Justine Triet’s courtroom drama took home three big prizes at this year’s Cannes: the coveted Palme d’Or, the highly competitive Palm Dog for very good boy Messi, and the unofficial prize of the catchiest song of the festival, with an instrumental cover of 50 Cent’s P.I.M.P. featuring at the heart of the film and in the minds of festival goers. A piercing dissection of a marriage, Anatomy of a Fall employs the suspicious death of Samuel (Samuel Theis) and the trial of his successful writer wife Sandra (Sandra Hüller) as a starting point to surgically examine ever-elusive notions of guilt and culpability while concurrently weaving a refined portrayal of modern parenthood, fluid gender roles and relationships. C) HOW TO HAVE SEX A trio of best friends embarks on a post-exams trip to Greece with one big goal in mind: to get Tara (Mia McKenna-Bruce in a star-making performance) to finally lose her virginity. Out with uniforms and textbooks, in with bright neon-coloured cut-out dresses, endless bottles of self-tan and even more of alcohol and you have How to Have Sex, Molly Manning Walker’s vividly realised directorial debut. Marrying all the comedic potential of a Brits-abroad flick to a sobering depiction of one of the bleakest rites of passage of female adolescence, Walker builds a film as accomplished in its portrayal of the thrilling highs as it is of the overwhelming lows of early adulthood. D) MAY DECEMBER One of the glitziest premieres at this year’s festival, Todd Haynes’ latest finds inspiration in the real-life case of Mary Kay Letourneau to tell the story of Gracie (Julianne Moore), a pet-shop employee who begins an ‘affair’ with her son’s 13-year-old friend Joe (Charles Melton), who she eventually marries after a long stint in prison. Framed through the eyes of Elizabeth (Natalie Portman), an actor looking to fully grasp the relationship in order to be able to portray Gracie in a new film, Haynes’ metatextual May December is a twisted, entertaining drama anchored in Portman and Moore’s deliciously self-aware performances, the two seesawing between decadent glamour and the hot-dog-smelling fever dream of The Stepford Wives Americana. A B C 8 | TOTAL FILM | JULY 2023

APPLE/PAR AMOUNT, CANNES, FILM4 D E F G JULY 2023 | TOTAL FILM | 9

HOT RIGHT NOW PEDRO PASCAL IS BIGGER THAN THE COLOSSEUM. With hit TV shows The Last of Us and The Mandalorian under his belt, Chilean-born American actor Pedro Pascal is one of the hottest stars on the planet right now. Everybody loves him. Nobody can get enough of him. Except for his extended family, that is. Telling Graham Norton, in March, that he has 34 first cousins, Pascal joked that they call him up and say, ‘You little shit. You’re so annoying. You finally got all the attention you were after…’ It was a long time coming. Back in the late 90s, Pascal was auditioning for commercials while waiting tables. The knockbacks were relentless. Then he started booking TV work, including one episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in 1999. Fifteen years later, in Season 4 of Game of Thrones, he played Oberyn Martell. The script he auditioned with was spoiler-heavy: ‘I was like, “I’m never gonna get this job, and the fourth season is fucking ruined,”’ he joked. He did get the job, and went on to play a DEA agent in Narcos. The needle was moving. Then his helmeted hero Mando changed things – big roles in Wonder Woman 1984 and The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent followed – and his tough-yet-tender Joel Miller, navigating a post-apocalyptic world in HBO’s glorious take on the iconic videogame, really changed things. Just look at his upcoming slate: Ridley Scott’s Gladiator 2 alongside Paul Mescal, Connie Nielsen and Denzel Washington; ‘horror epic’ Weapons by Barbarian’s Zach Cregger; drama Freaky Tales for Captain Marvel directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck; and Ethan Coen’s comedythriller Drive-Away Dolls, with Matt Damon, Margaret Qualley and Beanie Feldstein. All that plus starring opposite Ethan Hawke in Pedro Almodóvar’s queer western short Strange Way of Life, which debuted at the Cannes Film Festival in May. We’re just glad he’s still making room for S2 of The Last of Us. So, will creator Craig Mazin dare to follow the game? No spoilers, but something rather mind-blowing happens to Joel. ‘It wouldn’t make sense to follow the first game so faithfully only to stray severely from the path,’ Pascal told GQ. We’ll all be paying close attention. JAMIE GRAHAM DRIVE-AWAY DOLLS OPENS IN CINEMAS ON 22 SEPTEMBER. GLADIATOR 2 OPENS IN CINEMAS ON 22 NOVEMBER 2024. WEAPONS, FREAKY TALES, THE MANDALORIAN S4 AND THE LAST OF US S2 ARE TBA. DOUG INGLISH/TRUNK ARCHIVE 10 | TOTAL FILM | JULY 2023 SUBSCRIBE AT WWW.TOTALFILM.COM/SUBS

Spooky goings-on for stars Owen Wilson, Danny DeVito, Rosario Dawson and Tiffany Haddish EXCLUSIVE J amie Lee Curtis had a true, spiritual initiation into the role of Madame Leota, the disembodied head, afloat in a crystal ball, who first offers visitors passage into ‘regions beyond’. So her co-stars had something to react to, the actor kindly agreed to stick that legendary noggin of hers into an actual giant, transparent orb. Talk about dedication. When Disneyland guests first cross the pristine but gloomy portico of The Haunted Mansion, then flee the room that has no windows and no doors, and shuffle past busts whose eyes seem to follow them, it’s Leota who kicks off the ride’s ghostly jamboree. In Justin Simien’s adaptation, the latest in Disney’s attempts to bring its famous attractions to the big screen, viewers will, in his words, step into ‘the shoes of people who are experiencing the Mansion in the same way’. The house’s latest owner, Gabbie (Rosario Dawson), has invited a coterie of paranormal enthusiasts – played by LaKeith Stanfield, Tiffany Haddish, Owen Wilson and Danny DeVito – to uncover its secrets for themselves. ‘It’s a mystery that unfolds for this group trapped inside it,’ Simien says. ‘Part of the fun is getting a sense of things you can’t fully explain.’ On the ride, the inexplicable was achieved through old-world illusions favoured by stage magicians and practitioners of early cinema. Simien, however, looked to the classics of the late 80s and early 90s – Ghostbusters, Little Shop of Horrors, Beetlejuice – in order to conjure practical sets and effects wherever possible. Construction on The Haunted Mansion, which opened its doors in 1969, was repeatedly delayed as Disney Imagineers bickered over whether its purpose was to terrify or to amuse. The resulting collision of horror and humour proved ideal for the Dear White People director. Expect a candy box of cameos – ‘There are so many little moments of joy and I wanted each of those moments to have a really special person’ – and an unrecognisable turn from Jared Leto as fan favourite The Hatbox Ghost. It’s taken Disney a decade to reach this point of confidence with Haunted Mansion, following the quickly forgotten Eddie Murphy film from 2003 and a now-abandoned concept by Guillermo del Toro. This, as Simien describes, constitutes a ‘fresh start for the franchise, or at least, for the potential franchise. There are hints at a larger world. There are arrows pointing outwards to other places.’ That’s promising news for any Mansion-heads more affiliated with the ride’s multiple spin-offs in Disney parks across the globe. ‘I’m a fanboy at heart,’ Simien says. ‘So I just was, like, we gotta make the fans happy. Because if they’re not happy, what chance do we have?’ CLARISSE LOUGHREY HAUNTED MANSION OPENS IN CINEMAS ON 11 AUGUST. GHOST RIDERS HAUNTED MANSION A Disneyland classic comes to phantasmagorical life. ‘Part of the fun is getting a sense of things you can’t fully explain’ JUSTIN SIMIEN DISNEY Jamie Lee Curtis gets ahead of the game TOTALFILM.COM JULY 2023 | TOTAL FILM | 11

Annie Murphy voices mermaid Chelsea in the upcoming animated adventure, Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken SHUTTERSTOCK, UNIVERSAL YOU TALKIN’ TO ME? FILM QUOTES POSE AS QUESTIONS. FILM STARS TRY TO COPE. IN THE CROSSHAIRS THIS MONTH… ANNIE MURPHY You talkin’ to me? I am talking to you, although my window’s open, and there’s a neighbour sitting just outside on her balcony, so I’m pretty sure she’s going to be able to eavesdrop on everything that’s going on right now. Do you have an off switch? Oh, very much. I think I’m an outgoing introvert! I love being around people and socialising, but then I hit my wall, and I need to just curl up on my couch in a dark room and be alone with my dog. You ever had that feeling where you’re not sure if you’re awake or still dreaming? I have that feeling more or less every waking moment of my life, and I’m not entirely convinced that what we’re living isn’t a simulation. When you can live forever, what do you live for? I hope I don’t. I hope I’m not that one person that ends up living forever because what I live for is spending time with the people that I love. If they kick it, I don’t want to be dragging this life out much past that! As much as I want to live a long life, living forever seems a bit much. I thought you were supposed to be good… I was actually quite taken aback and impressed by myself in terms of how much I enjoyed the evil side of things [in Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken]. I really loved playing an evil mermaid, and it did seem to come shockingly natural to me. It might have opened up a can of worms. I don’t know. We all go a little mad sometimes. Haven’t you? Oh, yes, and thankfully there’s therapy and antidepressants for that. I think there are so many incredible, wonderful, mindblowing things about the world in which we live. But, you know, it’s also a really scary place, especially if you’re an empathetic person. I think sometimes it can be a lot to experience. Do you like what you do for a living? These things that you see? Most of the time, I love what I do for a living. As far as I know, we just have one life to live, and so acting, I think, is a loophole, and you get to live a whole bunch of lives, and experience a whole bunch of different personalities – especially with the comedy of it all. I get to work in comedy, where you get paid to go out and goof around, and laugh with a bunch of your friends. I can’t think of anything better. Why so serious? I do my very, very best to not be serious, even though I can talk about some serious issues right out of the gate. I think jokes are for always, and the less you take yourself seriously, and have a laugh instead of dwelling on something, I think that’s kind of the best medicine. What does ‘normal’ mean anyway? Nothing! Nothing is normal [laughs]. I was just looking outside, and I was like: ‘If you think about a tree, that is an exceptionally bizarre thing that we now just find commonplace.’ If you think about a tree more than you usually do, you realise that nothing is normal. Oh my God, this is the most stoner-y I’ve ever sounded in my life! Did you know that you can still get mail? [laughs] When you asked me the question, ‘If you could change something in your life…’ – the first thing that popped into my head was, ‘I wish that I got more letters, and wrote more letters.’ So, yeah, you can still get mail, but you don’t ever really get mail that you actually want to get, unfortunately. I think that people should try to send more postcards. That’s the last gasp of snail mail that’s easy and fun. I’m going to start doing that. Thank you for that inspiration. JORDAN FARLEY RUBY GILLMAN, TEENAGE KRAKEN OPENS IN CINEMAS ON 30 JUNE. You talk the talk. Do you walk the walk? I don’t know if I talk the talk or walk the walk! I’m constantly trying to do both of those things outwardly, at least. But on the inside, it’s always a struggle. If you could change something in your life, anything at all, what would it be? Oh, that’s a good one. I’d love to be able to feel confident enough singing that I could at least do it in the shower. I’m so bad at it that I embarrass myself alone in the shower. Why don’t you tell me the story of your life? Hey, man, we just met! At least take me out for a drink first. E N H A R R Y M E T S A L LY, S E 7 E N , T H E D A R K K N I G H T, F O R R E S T G U M P, S C H I T T ’ S C R E E K IGHT, BLADE RUNNER, PSYCHO, FULL METAL JACKET, THE SIXTH SENSE, WH QUESTIONS TAKEN FROM: TAXI DRIVER, DEADPOOL, THE MATRIX, TWIL 12 | TOTAL FILM | JULY 2023 SUBSCRIBE AT WWW.TOTALFILM.COM/SUBS

I f you know anything about Beanie Babies it’s probably that, for a moment in the mid-90s, they were as popular as Furbies, Tamagotchis and Tickle Me Elmos combined, fuelling one of the biggest speculative crazes in American history as $5 beanbag animals were bought and sold by ravenous collectors for thousands. Beanie Babies turned their eccentric creator, Ty Warner, into a billionaire in short order. But for the women in his orbit, those who possessed the innovative business acumen responsible for propelling Ty into the stratosphere – represented on screen in a new Apple TV+ film by Elizabeth Banks’ Robbie, Geraldine Viswanathan’s Maya and Sarah Snook’s Sheila – the Beanie Bubble wasn’t anywhere near as lucrative. ‘The Beanie craze was this amazingly colourful backdrop for us to tell a story about what and who we value and why,’ says Kristin Gore, the author-turned-screenwriter who co-directs with husband and OK Go frontman Damian Kulash. ‘When you really look at the female relationship to the American Dream, it’s much more fraught and dark. We wanted to show that pattern. We just didn’t expect it to come to us in this book about Beanie Babies!’ Based on Zac Bissonnette’s non-fiction book The Great Beanie Baby Bubble, Gore and Kulash’s film isn’t really about Beanie Babies or Zach Galifianakis’ Warner, who Kulash describes as ‘Willy Wonka with a real dark side’. With a smart, fractured chronology that emphasises how the women in Ty’s world are exploited over and over again, it’s about a country and a system at large. ‘We understand how pretentious it sounds to be talking about Beanie Babies as if they are the be all and end all of philosophy and meaning,’ says Kulash. ‘But that’s what we liked about it! ‘Again, as pretentious as this sounds,’ Kulash continues, ‘the main reference was actually Casino. Obviously ours isn’t a mob film. But what we loved was going: “What was the beginning of Las Vegas?” and using that as a framework in which real human stories happen. Our ridiculous, little world is a bundle of joy in which we can see real humanity.’ JORDAN FARLEY THE BEANIE BUBBLE RELEASES ON APPLE TV+ ON 28 JULY. PLUSH HOUR THE BEANIE BUBBLE Trojan Horse comedy drama pulls at the seams of the Beanie Baby craze. EXCLUSIVE Elizabeth Banks TOTALFILM.COM JULY 2023 | TOTAL FILM | 13 What stood out to you about the script? There are so many of these movies that are about mythological, mostly male figures. The idea that this was going to be about the ‘little people’ who were the wind beneath his wings – that was really lovely. And the fact that it was a group of women was also really exciting. Could you relate as a woman in film? If you’re in a big, maledominated industry, you’ve certainly sat in those meetings where you are a minority voice, or feel a little trepidatious about speaking. The great thing about Robbie is, she’s not afraid of Ty. Any room that they go into, she feels comfortable. How much of a priority is acting as you’ve moved into directing? Acting is my first love. I love serving other people’s vision. And I am able to then take whatever I learn into directing. I think it actually sets me apart from 90% of directors, because I’m on set with other directors more. Did you keep any Beanies? One! It was a very special one for the cast and crew. He’s like a little frog. They had to make all the Beanie Babies [in the film]. We were able to use the Ty tags, but not any of the IP. JORDAN FARLEY Zach Galifianakis and Elizabeth Banks toy with big themes of patriarchy and profit APPLE, GETTY

WARNER BROS. 14 | TOTAL FILM | JULY 2023

A BUG’S LIFE BLUE BEETLE Director Angel Manuel Soto burrows into the DCU. EXCLUSIVE Before the James Gunn and Peter Safran-helmed regime change kicks in under the DCU banner, there are still several DC Extended Universe movies to come out under the old guard. Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom is one, due in December of this year, while The Flash is currently racing across screens. Next, there’s the interesting proposition of Blue Beetle – a lesser-known comic-book character and brand-new superhero for the screen – which arrives at a time when the DC Universe is in a state of flux. Trailers are promising – an extended look was shown to a receptive CinemaCon audience in April – but what are the film’s prospects in light of the shift at DC HQ, where does it sit among the existing movies, and how does it fit into the Gunn-Safran DCU? Blue Beetle director Angel Manuel Soto tells Teasers that the film, which stars Xolo Maridueña in the title role, is not tied to the past films, but has cemented a place in the new DCU. ‘We are part of the universe, we are part of the world, we are part of the plans that they have been creating for the future instalments of the DCU,’ Soto confirms. ‘But we are not tied to all the films from the past. Yes, our movie lives in the world where superheroes exist. But that doesn’t mean that a certain event, or certain alliance, or certain things from the past dictate where our film is going.’ Soto’s eye is very much on the DCU future, revealing that Blue Beetle was made with at least two sequels in mind. ‘Our first movie, the way we wanted to do it, was always with the mentality that we wanted to do two more, at least,’ Soto says. ‘And taking the traditional three-act structure of a story, we wanted our first movie to practically be the first act of a saga. So by the time our movie ends, now [Jaime Reyes, aka Blue Beetle] can go into the new world.’ The first movie is family-orientated, and we spend time getting to know Jaime, who reluctantly becomes Blue Beetle when an alien biotech symbiote bonds with him and endows him with powers. Soto notes that the movie feels ‘contained enough so that it doesn’t feel attached to anything else’, and that approaching the story the way they have makes it really exciting. ‘Because, then, by being in our own world, our hero can actually belong to something better. The same way that Batman has Gotham, Superman has Metropolis and the Flash has Central City, Blue Beetle has Palmera City.’ Soto grins. ‘Whatever happens after [this film] is game on, and I think that’s very exciting because it creates an opportunity for him to have his own position within the new DCU.’ KIM TAYLOR-FOSTER BLUE BEETLE OPENS IN CINEMAS ON 18 AUGUST. JULY 2023 | TOTAL FILM | 15

This year’s Writers Guild of America strike began on 2 May GETTY I t would be nice to commence with optimism when you get your dream gig, a column in a magazine you’ve adored for decades. To discuss new waves of filmmakers, innovative trends or giant feats of imagination coming our way. But things are looking pretty bleak. Most Total Film readers probably know that the WGA (Writers Guild of America) has been striking for a ‘fair deal’ with the AMPTP (Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers). The WGA’s position is that billions are being made from their members’ work, but ‘pay and working conditions have significantly eroded over the past decade’. It’s unclear how long negotiations will take. The WGA strike in 2007 lasted 100 days, and 1988’s for 153, so it’s unlikely to be over by the time you read this. The strike is in the news, but photos of Jason Sudeikis, Tina Fey, and Mindy Kaling on the picket line aren’t competing with Ken Loach for heart-wrenching depictions of the importance of workers’ rights. It could all easily buy into alt-right narratives about ‘Hollywood elites’, spoiled virtuesignalling millionaires who would take a private jet to lecture ordinary people about climate change. But this is about much more than whether celebrities holding signs supporting the WGA can afford extensions to their beach houses. There are 11,500 people striking, and many more actors, electricians, caterers, make-up LEILA WILL BE BACK NEXT ISSUE. FOR FURTHER MUSINGS AND MISSIVES FOLLOW @LEILA_LATIF ON TWITTER. THIS MONTH Why the Hollywood writers’ strike is a way bigger deal than you realise. artists, set dressers, and whatever a ‘best boy’ is (truly one of cinema’s great mysteries) are now also out of work. There are many reasons why writers are struggling: streaming means shorter and more infrequent TV seasons, and their films pay about half that of theatrical releases. Recently, the ‘mini room’ has emerged, with a head writer and one or two novices paid in minimum rates and ‘experience’. Then there are residuals. If you wrote an episode of Cheers in the 1980s, when it was re-aired you would get paid again as your words earn more profit. Today, if you write Stranger Things or Ted Lasso, while it can spend years bringing in thousands of subscribers and millions of dollars, you don’t get a cut in the longblooming fruits of your labour. So, while that may seem an unfair but niche concern that will lead to a dearth of sharply written dialogue, I have bad news – this could lead to seismic consequences. During the 1988 strike, Rupert Murdoch’s new station, Fox, boomed by pivoting to unscripted shows, broadcasting ‘copaganda’ like Cops and America’s Most Wanted. Fox News launched a decade later, starting an era of agenda-heavy, opinion-led ‘news’. The 2007 strike was not only why Quantum of Solace’s plot was so hard to follow; it was also the reason Donald Trump’s reality show, The Celebrity Apprentice, was commissioned when no new season of The Apprentice had been ordered. And… we all know how that turned out. The Kardashians also came to TV in 2007, birthing influencer culture for better and for worse (mostly worse). I have loved plenty of unscripted shows, from Drag Race’s celebration of queer culture to the riveting betrayals in The Traitors. But there has also been so much human misery, from Love Island’s suicides to Joe Rogan challenging people to chug pints of donkey semen for cash. Gary Oldman may have been on to something when he called reality TV ‘the museum of social decay’. Dark times lay ahead with vulnerable people prepared to be exploited on camera, desperate studios haemorrhaging cash, writers on the breadline and a public that wants to escape into the magic of movies. But as film fans and empathetic humans, there’s one clear side to be on, and it’s not the one that commissioned The Celebrity Apprentice. Contributing editor LEILA LATIF has something to say… 16 | TOTAL FILM | JULY 2023 SUBSCRIBE AT WWW.TOTALFILM.COM/SUBS

Ella Lily Hyland is young player Justine, with Aidan Turner (below) as her former coach EXCLUSIVE Tennis is having its moment on screen and we’re not talking about Wimbledon, from Luca Guadagnino’s upcoming Challengers to Netflix doc Break Point. Exploring the dark side of the pro circuit is Fifteen-Love, a drama about a tennis coach, Glenn Lapthorn (Aidan Turner), who is gunning for Grand Slam glory when an explosive accusation by his former protégé Justine Pearce (newcomer Ella Lily Hyland) sends a volley through his perfect world. The series keeps the audience on a knife edge where nobody is sure who’s telling the truth. Why did you take that approach? Ella Lily Hyland: Justine’s very instinctual, and then her mind and body play catch-up, which is kind of what athletes are like, they work from a primal instinct. She’s playing catch-up the whole time and the audience are figuring it out with her. Aidan Turner: She’s questioning herself, and that’s down to the chess moves Glenn has played earlier. It’s that manipulation which is nuanced and not overtly in your face. We need to rely on our own sensibilities to figure out who is doing what and how two things can be true at the same time. Hania Elkington (creator): For young people with these enormous pressures to be the best, when something like this happens, it can be very destabilising. Your perception of something at the time can be different to how you then see it later on. You don’t know who to believe or trust and Justine is not necessarily a reliable protagonist. There are lots of secret betrayals and lies on both sides. There is no obvious good guy or bad guy in Fifteen-Love. Why did you play it that way? HE: Glenn is, in many ways, a terrific person. He isn’t without goodness and talent and all of these things. Unfortunately, sometimes those sorts of layers are used to help manipulate people close to him to create this smokescreen. AT: He comes across as an affable and trustworthy person, but there are also elements of his character that are cruel and manipulative. Morally, his compass points are at times in completely the wrong direction. There are aspects of his character that are incredibly dubious and questionable. The series shows how intense the coach/player relationship is and goes into some very murky areas… AT: There are very grey areas with Glenn. He is addicted to being loved and adored, and these young players look up to him like he’s a god. He might feel there are blurred lines, but he also feels that to be a great coach, he might need to sometimes step over the mark. HE: When young people are extremely good at what they do, there is a level of maturity and adulthood that’s presumed because they are functioning in an adult world. There’s the unwillingness to remember that these are often children still. Even though it is set in the world of elite sport, do you feel it is a universal story? ELH: The themes are actually really universal. The emotions are very human. She experiences jealousy, spite, resentment and insecurity, and it doesn’t feel black and white. It’s an experience to explore all those emotional chords. ALIA WAHEED FIFTEEN-LOVE RELEASES ON PRIME VIDEO ON 21 JULY. COURTING CONTROVERSY FIFTEEN-LOVE Provocative TV drama explores the dark side of the tennis world… ‘There are elements of his character that are cruel and manipulative’ AIDAN TURNER 18 | TOTAL FILM | JULY 2023 SUBSCRIBE AT WWW.TOTALFILM.COM/SUBS

The month in dialogue and digits. TOTALFILM.COM s. JULY 2023 | TOTAL FILM | 19 RISING SON Having just locked Killers of the Flower Moon, Martin Scorsese has revealed his next project will return to a familiar subject: Jesus Christ. ‘A WHITE MALE CAN DIRECT A $200 MILLION FILM, FAIL AND GET ANOTHER ONE. THAT’S THE PROBLEM.’ THE AGE OF ONCE UPON A TIME… IN HOLLYWOOD’S RICK DALTON WHEN HE WAS KILLED OFF BY QUENTIN TARANTINO LAST MONTH. EVA LONGORIA ON THE HIGHER STANDARDS FEMALE FILMMAKERS ARE HELD TO. ‘IF YOU EVER REALLY CARED ABOUT KEN, YOU WOULD KNOW THAT NOBODY CARED ABOUT KEN. SO YOUR HYPOCRISY IS EXPOSED. THIS IS WHY HIS STORY MUST BE TOLD.’ RYAN GOSLING HITS BACK AT HIS KEN CRITICS. ‘I MEAN, WHAT ARE YOU ASKING ME THAT CRAP FOR?’ GETTY MILES ABANDONED AT SEA Moana star Auli‘i Cravalho says she hasn’t been invited back for the live-action remake. THE LENGTH OF A 70MM IMAX PRINT OF OPPENHEIMER. THAT’S A LOT OF MOVIE… ‘WHAT WAS REALLY COOL WAS GETTING TO AUDITION FOR BOND.’ YEARS COULD REBEL WILSON BE THE NEXT BOND WOMAN? ‘Physical copies in the age of streaming are a moral Fahrenheit 451 level duty.’ GUILLERMO DEL TORO ADVOCATES FOR PHYSICAL RELEASES AS TITLES ARE REMOVED FROM STREAMING PLATFORMS. HARRISON FORD DOES NOT LIKE THE AGE-OLD QUESTION OF WHO WOULD WIN IN A FIGHT BETWEEN HAN SOLO AND INDIANA JONES.

John Boyega and Jamie Foxx play Fontaine and Slick Charles, with Teyonah Parris as Yo-Yo (below) EXCLUSIVE Getting John Boyega, Jamie Foxx and Teyonah Parris as the central trio in your directorial debut is an astonishing coup. But it’s even more remarkable given that Juel Taylor signed his stars to play a drug dealer, a pimp and a sex worker in They Cloned Tyrone, an audacious blend of sci-fi, comedy, mystery, satire and blaxploitation. ‘We had that joke on set: a pimp, a prostitute and a drug dealer walk into a bar…’ he tells Teasers with a laugh. The characters fit into bleak stereotypes of Black Americans, but the film uses them to dive into a mystery that satirises a larger rot in America’s foundation. It speaks to everything from gentrification and gun violence to the Tuskegee experiment, where hundreds of Black men were unknowingly studied for 40 years to monitor the long-term effects of (curable) syphilis. For Taylor, that shameful event is literally close to home. ‘I’m from Alabama, I’m from Tuskegee!’ he says, pointing out that he grew up with the sense that ‘there’s undoubtedly been some shenanigans happening, some skulduggery’. But while They Cloned Tyrone explores some real-life horrors, the message had to come second to crafting compelling cinema. ‘It was the attempt not to be didactic, preachy,’ nods Taylor. ‘You want it first and foremost to be enjoyable. And if you extract something from it, all well and good.’ The plot twists and untwists with thrilling frequency. ‘The conspiracies were a good way of giving you another layer. If you want to go into that, there are Easter eggs, there are rabbit holes, and there’s mischief to be mined from that.’ Said mischief is grounded by another incredible turn from Boyega as drug dealer Fontaine, a role that harkens back to his debut, playing a seemingly unsympathetic CLONE GUFFAWS THEY CLONED TYRONE Identity crises and mysteries in Juel Taylor’s cool comedy sci-fi. ‘You want it first and foremost to be enjoyable’ JUEL TAYLOR NETFLIX anti-hero as a young hoodlum in Attack the Block. That performance is one Taylor adores, gushing, ‘In the first five minutes, they went outta their way to make him the bad guy. But he’s too charismatic. He has too much natural warmth. You can’t not root for him.’ Taylor can still scarcely believe his luck to have Boyega in his film. ‘He’s an amazing actor and super-collaborative. I don’t know what would’ve happened with this movie if John wasn’t so hyper-talented because he has so much responsibility narratively. Jamie and Teyonah create it too, but the thematic premises are explored through Fontaine – he’s the straight man that makes the humorous moments work.’ For all the laughs and swagger of the film, there are profound themes at play. ‘Existential crisis and revelation of self,’ is how Taylor puts it, and that’s no laughing matter, however much the set-up might feel like a joke. LEILA LATIF THEY CLONED TYRONE RELEASES ON NETFLIX ON 21 JULY. 20 | TOTAL FILM | JULY 2023 SUBSCRIBE AT WWW.TOTALFILM.COM/SUBS

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EXCLUSIVE The Master of Suspense gets a new documentary SHORT CUTSThe latest happenings in movieland… Growing up in Belfast in the 70s, Mark Cousins saw a lot of horror movies before he was 10 years old. ‘Local video stores had everything on the black market – I saw video nasties at a ridiculously early age,’ he says. ‘Then I saw Psycho. I could see that it was scary, but also something else. If you want to be simple, you could call it “art”.’ LOOK WHO’S TALKING MY NAME IS ALFRED HITCHCOCK A new doc sees Hitch speak from beyond the grave… While Psycho electrified Cousins’ senses, he also picked up on the bold structure, the atypical pacing, the unusual camera placement. He could sense there was ‘something hypnotic and nighttime about it’. Cut to 50 years later and Cousins is an esteemed documentarian (The Story of Film: An Odyssey, The Eyes of Orson Welles) with Hitchcock tattoos on his arm. It’s no surprise, then, to see him hitching his wagon to the Master of Suspense, though how he goes about it is startling. Not only does My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock have Hitch address modern viewers in the first person (courtesy of impressionist Alistair McGowan), it finds new things to talk about in his discussed-to-death work. Desire, fulfilment and escape make for intriguing topics, but loneliness is especially fresh and resonant. ‘People say the pleasure of going to the cinema is being in a crowd, laughing together and crying together,’ says Cousins. ‘But when you’re in a cinema, you’re on your own. You’re not talking to other people. Cinema attracts loners and shy people and nervous people.’ Does this, as much as anything else, explain the enduring appeal of Hitchcock’s work? ‘Everybody has felt solitude, some of us crave it,’ nods Cousins. ‘Hitchcock was really good at isolating a character within the frame and widening the frame to show the space around the person.’ JAMIE GRAHAM MY NAME IS ALFRED HITCHCOCK OPENS IN CINEMAS AND IS AVAILABLE ON DEMAND FROM 21 JULY. ‘I could see that Psycho was scary… but also “art”’ MARK COUSINS GETT Y, UNIVERSAL, DOGWOOF AGEING UP Oppenheimer will be Christopher Nolan’s first R-rated movie in the US since 2002’s Insomnia. The rating appeared at the end of a TV spot in the States, meaning we can expect a 15 certificate in the UK. FAST TIMES Dwayne Johnson has taken to social media to make good on the promise of Fast X’s postcredits sting. ‘I am 100% confirming… Hobbs is back!’ The Rock’s superagent is set to clash with Jason Momoa’s Dante. Bring it. SIMPLY THE BEST Tina Turner passed away on 24 May, aged 83. The Queen of Rock ’n’ Roll won eight Grammy awards and appeared in movies Tommy, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome and The Last Action Hero. FAST FORWARD The Flash is currently zipping across cinema screens, but Warner Bros. had a sequel script in the can before it even came out. It’s penned by Aquaman scribbler David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick. Talk about a fast mover. 22 | TOTAL FILM | JULY 2023 SUBSCRIBE AT WWW.TOTALFILM.COM/SUBS

NEXT BIG THING Award-winning Broadway star Andrew Barth Feldman rose to fame as the title character in the 2019 production of Dear Evan Hansen. Making the jump from stage to screen, he has appeared in High School Musical: The Musical: The Series and A Tourist’s Guide to Love. Next up, he stars as awkward teen Percy in Gene Stupnitsky’s raunchy comedy No Hard Feelings. How are you finding the move to screen? My career has happened in leaps and bounds and I’m hugely fortunate. Where my heart lies is in the telling of stories and being in service of that. And [No Hard Feelings] is a story that I happen to love dearly. ANDREW BARTH FELDMAN IS FEELING GOOD in my film and TV work. When I did High School Musical, I had so much room to improvise. And Gene from the very beginning was so open about having us improvise. He really wanted to know what I had to say about Percy as a young person. Do you aim to balance stage and screen, going forward? Even that is sort of limiting to me. It’s not that I have particular ambitions for one form or another, or wearing one hat or another. I’m riding the wave and seeing wherever it takes me. JOEL HARLEY NO HARD FEELINGS IS OUT NOW IN CINEMAS Director Gene Stupnitsky teased that he put your Broadway skills to use during the shoot… When I came on, there was a moment missing for Percy. They found videos of me on the internet playing piano and singing my original music – that was put in the movie as this turning point. I got to do the arrangement myself and play it live on the day. I had to sing a little bit worse than I usually do because we didn’t want people to be like, ‘Oh, he’s a trained singer!’ How did No Hard Feelings compare to your previous film and TV experiences? It really did combine everything I’ve learned TOTALFILM.COM JULY 2023 | TOTAL FILM | 23 STEPHANIE DIANI 2023

1. TEENAGE KICKS There have been six movies and at least five Turtles TV shows but, for the first time ever, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Donatello and Raphael are played by age-appropriate young adults. ‘We’re delivering on “teenage”!’ Rowe exclaims. To harness the inimitable chaos that ensues when teenage boys hang out, all four young actors recorded their lines together. ‘We tried to capture the improvisational nature of them making fun of each other, and talking over each other. It’s that real kind of teenage energy. Our postproduction sound people wanted to murder us for the amount of messes they had to clean up.’ 2. TOY STORY ‘I remember learning how to think, and then I remember learning how to love the Ninja Turtles,’ says Rowe, a lifelong fan. But it wasn’t the cult Kevin Eastman/Peter Laird comic books, or even the many animated and live-action film and TV adaptations that Rowe latched on to as a child. ‘Really, the most time I spent with the Turtles was playing with the toys, and creating stories and worlds,’ he says. ‘That toy line was so inventive and creative, and there were so many details sculpted into every character model, and each character told a little story. I think it was hugely influential.’ 3. THE GREAT MUTATION While Rowe won’t be drawn on whether Shredder will appear in the film, there will be ooze-mutated animals aplenty. ‘We have so many mutants in the movie, and we’re really using the capabilities of animation to deliver on these unhinged character designs.’ Some of the potential highlights: Ice Cube as Superfly, Rogen and John Cena as Bebop and Rocksteady, and Paul Rudd as Mondo Gecko. ‘[While writing the script] Seth and I would talk, and we would be like, ‘Oh, yeah, remember that toy? Remember the gecko guy?’ There was a lot of that.’ EXCLUSIVE THE GREEN PARTY TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES: MUTANT MAYHEM Seth Rogen reboots the heroes in a half shell. Emboldened by the success of Spider-Man: Into the SpiderVerse, 2023 has turned into a banner year for stylistically experimental animated movies. Next up is TMNT: Mutant Mayhem, a striking new take on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles from writer-producer Seth Rogen, writer-director Jeff Rowe (The Mitchells vs. the Machines) and co-director Kyler Spears. ‘[Spider-Verse] convinced studios that you can make money, win awards and be successful,’ says Rowe, ‘all while being different.’ 01 PARAMOUNT 02 24 | TOTAL FILM | JULY 2023

5. SKETCH COMEDY You may be familiar with the Turtles, but Rowe says that you’ve never seen them like this. ‘We thought: “In the way that Spider-Verse is like a living comic book, what’s our version of that?” We looked at drawings we all did when we were in high school – the way you sketch things before you know how to draw. And we were like, “That’s a really cool technique. We should make the movie look like that, and then spend millions of dollars to make it look really slick and professional!” I hope every film looks different now. I hope the idea of a studio having a house style disappears.’ 6. CRACKED SHELL Famously, much of Turtles ‘lore’ was improvised to justify new toy lines. Mutant Mayhem won’t subscribe to any one canon; instead, Rowe hopes it will establish a new template going forward. ‘There were a lot of things that were skated past, and we took a lot of time to make it more logical and to really operate from a place of character and relatability that, I think, will be shockingly emotional. The goal early on in our conversations with Seth were: “We want people to leave the theatre, and be like, ‘I can’t believe I just cried at a Ninja Turtles movie.’” JORDAN FARLEY TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES: MUTANT MAYHEM OPENS IN CINEMAS ON 31 JULY. 4. FRESH START Describing the film as a coming-of-age and origin story in ‘technical movie terms’, Rowe is aiming to ‘reinvent the [TMNT] franchise’ with Mutant Mayhem. ‘We are doing it in a way that is irreverent, modern, exciting and hopefully elevating.’ With a lofty goal of creating the most beloved iterations to date, Rowe wants his Turtles to be more than colour-coded archetypes. ‘It’s really giving each of them a lot of depth and personality,’ the director says. ‘Everyone has been a teenager, and has felt like an outsider at some point. It’s looking at the experience of being a mutant teenager, living in a sewer, as kind of a metaphor for teenage alienation, and wanting to fit in and belong.’ 03 04 06 05 The Turtles race into action in this exclusive concept art provided to Teasers JULY 2023 | TOTAL FILM | 25

CAN WE TALK ABOUT? This is swiftly turning into the year of the cliffhanger ending. In 2023, we’ve already seen Dominic Toretto square off against an exploding dam, Miles Morales come face to face with himself, and there’s still Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One to come, the movie with the best chance of ending on some literal cliffhanging. You can probably blame it on the Avengers: Infinity War effect. The Snap was such an anticipation-builder that it helped briefly propel Avengers: Endgame to the all-time box-office top spot. From a commercial perspective, the logic is sound; a truly great cliffhanger will guarantee bums on seats next time around as ravenous viewers clamour to because it ends with its main character, Thanos, fulfilling his ambition and watching the sun rise on a grateful universe. Fast X, for all its ludicrous joys, just decides to slam on the brakes. Even the otherwise excellent Across the Spider-Verse fumbles the finale by suddenly leaving so much hanging in the balance. For some films, a cliffhanger ending is the lesser of two evils. Dune was not designed to be told in two distinct parts, but if the alternative (ask David Lynch) is irreparable harm to the story, there’s really no choice. The key, as The Empire Strikes Back demonstrates, is to give characters full arcs, and build to a natural break in the narrative, even if it’s demonstrably not the end of the journey. The alternative is the gradual, imperceptible transformation of cinema into serialised TV, and that’s not an ending anyone wants to see. discover how, for example, Dom’s bulging biceps deflect several metric tonnes of raging water. But do televisual cliffhanger endings, where plotlines and character journeys are left unresolved, really belong on the big screen? There’s a stark difference between films that tell a complete story, while leaving the door open for the characters and world to continue, versus those that simply stop in a fashion akin to a season finale. The aforementioned Infinity War is a complete film (in as much as any MCU film is ‘complete’) CLIFFHANGER ENDINGS MOVIES ARE LEARNING THE WRONG LESSONS FROM TV ‘FAST X, FOR ALL ITS LUDICROUS JOYS, JUST DECIDES TO SLAM ON THE BRAKES’ Miles and Gwen are on the edge of their seats waiting for the next Spider-Verse film JORDAN FARLEY NEWS EDITOR S P O I L E R ALERT! SONY 26 | TOTAL FILM | JULY 2023 SUBSCRIBE AT WWW.TOTALFILM.COM/SUBS

Georgie has to reconnect with her estranged father when her mother dies EXCLUSIVE British director Charlotte Regan’s debut Scrapper is, like its title, a punchy little number. It follows Georgie (Lola Campbell), a 12-year-old living secretly alone in her flat after her mum dies. ‘I know she’s struggling with a lot. But the intention we always had was to make a joyful working-class film about the resilience of kids,’ says Regan. ‘Even when people do have parents, and this isn’t exclusive to working-class environments, kids can often be raising themselves, whatever situation they’re in.’ While the story kicks into gear as Georgie’s estranged father Jason (Harris Dickinson) comes back from Ibiza to live with her, Regan’s good to her word: Scrapper is more magic realism than kitchen-sink miserablism, down to the talking spiders in Georgie’s household. ‘I’ve always loved what Taika Waititi does with worlds and I’ve always thought, “It’s such a shame that we don’t do more of that over here.” I don’t think the spiders are smash hits or the most flawless moments of the film, but I like that we decided to take risks.’ Casting Jason was easy. Regan had previously worked with Triangle of Sadness star Dickinson on her 2019 short Oats & Barley, although she didn’t write the role with him in mind. ‘I always thought the film should revolve around the kid. So you cast Georgie first and then the dad needs to suit Georgie, not the other way around.’ To find her actor for Georgie was another matter, with Regan turning to Shaheen Baig, the experienced casting director behind Lady Macbeth, The Falling and A Monster Calls. ‘She’s amazing at finding street-cast kids,’ says Regan, who was astounded by newcomer Lola Campbell. ‘She just came there on the first day and was incredible. Although she’d go in waves. If she hadn’t had Greggs or McDonald’s for breakfast, then she was an absolute savage for hours and would be fuming at us! But she’s amazing. I think she will always be the most incredible actor I work with. She’s just so intuitive. And can out-improv anyone.’ When Regan wasn’t feeding the ravenous Campbell, she had to cope with real spiders on set for the scenes where the creatures (in Georgie’s head) converse with other. This included a real tarantula. ‘I don’t know why he brought it, the spider man! Because we didn’t ask for a tarantula. He just had a whole boot full of boxes of spiders. One day, he’s like, “Oh, I brought my tarantula. Here it is.”’ In the edit, it was Regan’s ‘biggest battle’ to keep the shot of the eight-legged beast in. ‘Everyone’s like, “Why is there a tarantula there?” And I was like, “Why are the feckin’ spiders talking? If we’re going with that logic...”’ Fair point. JAMES MOTTRAM SCRAPPER OPENS IN CINEMAS ON 25 AUGUST. HOME ALONE SCRAPPER Charlotte Regan’s debut feature has plenty of fighting spirit… ‘Lola is just so intuitive. She can out-improv anyone’ PICTUREHOUSE ENTERTAINMENT CHARLOTTE REGAN Harris Dickinson and newcomer Lola Campbell star as father and daughter TOTALFILM.COM JULY 2023 | TOTAL FILM | 27

Virginie Efira as Mia, a woman who faces psychological trauma after surviving a terrorist attack EXCLUSIVE On the evening of 13 November 2015, a series of coordinated terror attacks in Paris left at least 130 people dead and more than 400 others injured. The epicentre of the chaos was the Bataclan theatre in the city’s 11th arrondissement, where a raid on a concert by the American rock band Eagles of Death Metal saw 90 lose their lives. Alice Winocour’s brother was at the Bataclan that night and was one of those lucky enough to walk away from it. Through him she would meet and talk to other survivors, sowing the seeds for what would go on to become her fourth directorial feature. ‘I built the film around my memories and the conversations I had with my brother and others in the following days and months,’ the Proxima director explains. ‘The attack is not the subject of this movie; it is really about its aftermath.’ Paris Memories tells the (fictional) story of Mia, a translator who finds herself in a Parisian café at the exact moment it is subjected to a deadly gun assault. Like Winocour’s sibling she lives to tell the tale – or would do, were her recollections of the event not so fragmented and fractured she can hardly make sense of them. The only thing Mia can remember with clarity is a faceless stranger who held her hand. The more time she spends with those affected and bereaved by the tragedy, the surer she becomes that her personal road to recovery hangs on learning his identity. ‘It’s as if a mirror has exploded and she’s trying to put the pieces back together,’ Winocour continues. ‘She’s kind of like a zombie that’s coming back to life.’ Not your average day at the office, then, for lead actress Virginie Efira, who consulted experts in PTSD and memory retrieval as part of her preparation. ‘I had to learn how people could have this feeling of not belonging to the world anymore,’ the Benedetta star tells Teasers. ‘I had to understand how memories actually function in order to render Mia properly.’ Key to Winocour’s film is the attack itself, which required a facsimile of a genuine Parisian bistro to be constructed in a studio. ‘People would have thought it was a real attack if we’d shot in the middle of Paris, and the restaurant was not happy with the idea of us destroying everything,’ says the director. As convincing as the mayhem was, however, it was always pretend for Efira. ‘There were extras on set who were saying afterwards that it felt like the real thing,’ she recalls. ‘I was like, “Come on, take it easy. We’ll have catering after this, so let’s not compare things that have nothing to do with one another…”’ NEIL SMITH PARIS MEMORIES OPENS IN CINEMAS ON 4 AUGUST. AIDE MEMOIRE PARIS MEMORIES A terrorist attack survivor tries to move on in a drama based on real events. ‘She’s kind of like a zombie coming back to life’ ALICE WINOCOUR PICTUREHOUSE ENTERTAINMENT Mia with fellow survivor Thomas (Benoît Magimel) 28 | TOTAL FILM | JULY 2023 SUBSCRIBE AT WWW.TOTALFILM.COM/SUBS

SARAH POTTER, SHUTTERSTOCK, ALAMY British writer-director Sally Potter broke through with 1992’s Orlando, starring Tilda Swinton. Her other films include the drama The Man Who Cried, teen drama Ginger & Rosa and acerbic political comedy The Party, starring Kristin Scott Thomas and Timothy Spall. Now, she’s returning to one of her first loves: composing and performing music, with a new album called Pink Bikini. New album Pink Bikini, Christina Ricci and Johnny Depp in The Man Who Cried, and Tilda Swinton as Orlando Pink Bikini feels very intimate, very 1960s. What’s the concept behind it? The lyrics concept is about the teenage years - a close look at the epic, dramatic inner life of a teenage girl, based on some of the feelings that I had as I moved through those years. My observation is that everybody goes through several Greek tragedies during the teenage years, which are formative and extraordinary. The musical concept was to make something very direct, very simple, that would evoke the directness of that kind of feeling. What are the biggest lessons that you learned as a young filmmaker? Basically, not to give up. I saw people giving up on filmmaking - they might make one film and then go: ‘This is just too hard and too depressing.’ I began to feel that the only difference between those that go on to make films and those that don’t is that some people give up and some people don’t. Did Orlando’s success spur you on? Funnily enough, I felt really confused by it. I was so used to being an outsider, working in opposition to the mainstream, the biggest budget film I’d ever made by a long way. It had a lot of big stars in it; and I happened to be going through a very difficult time in my own life. I found that with every film, to some degree, one starts inhabiting the subject matter almost unconsciously - you have to live in that world for four years, more, maybe. But it became a cult film that is still showing all over the place, all the time. Let’s talk about Ginger & Rosa… Ginger & Rosa was a film about teenage girls, teenage friendship, songs of protest. So there are some overlaps with Pink Bikini. It’s rich and fertile territory. One of the standout things to me was the experience of working with Elle Fanning, who was 13 at the time, playing 16, and Alice Englert, who was I think 17 playing 16. I got very close to them. What was the atmosphere like on set during The Party? Wonderful. We laughed so much in between takes - there was an enormous amount of good humour and goodwill. They’re all great collaborators. They found the script funny and they found each other funny. I also really enjoyed writing it. I discovered that an acid tongue came quite naturally. It’s not at all myself, but give me a character to write like that and it kept flowing out. Is there something quite therapeutic about being acid-tongued? Well, it’s about exposing the subtext, isn’t it? There’s a lot of nicey-nicey good-virtue signalling behaviour everywhere. And often, you dig down a little bit and there’s a kind of shadow side coming out. And so it’s when you expose that shadow side that it becomes very funny, because the illusions that people have about themselves are shattered. ANNA SMITH PINK BIKINI RELEASES ON 14 JULY. that that was the only place I knew how to survive. I’d never been let into this magical secret inner circle of film privilege. So suddenly, I was in the middle of this thing called success, which as we know, is an illusion. But in the long term, it’s wonderful to make a piece of work that reaches out and makes not just an impression, but possibly even makes a difference to some people in their lives. What was it like then working with Cate Blanchett, Christina Ricci and Johnny Depp on The Man Who Cried? The Man Who Cried was a different kind of challenge, because it was SALLY POTTER THE ACCLAIMED DIRECTOR ON MOVIES, MUSIC AND PINK BIKINIS. ‘IT’S WONDERFUL TO MAKE A PIECE OF WORK THAT REACHES OUT’ TOTALFILM.COM JULY 2023 | TOTAL FILM | 29

Gal Gadot proved female-led blockbusters could make money and win hearts with Wonder Woman. Now she’s driving a potential new spy franchise with Heart of Stone, which puts kick-ass women and stunts front and centre. Can she repeat the trick? WORDS JANE CROWTHER

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f you’ve seen the latest instalments from the DCEU and Fast franchises you’ll have clocked Gal Gadot popping up (in Fast X, quite literally) to cameo. Now, Wonder Woman herself is keen to create an action series with herself front and centre to rival all the big boys and their toys. Give Dom, Bond and Ethan Hunt a high-octane, multi-pic run for their money? Why not? ‘I must say that this whole thing was something that I had in mind for a long time, but I also always felt like, “Who knows if there’s going to be an audience for it? A female-leadingcharacter action movie,”’ Gadot admits when Total Film catches her in late May on an unseasonably grey and cold day in Los Angeles. ‘But then when Wonder Woman came out, it really showed that the audiences – as long as the story works, and as long as it’s believable and good and done well – they’re all for it, you know?’ Ah yes, Patty Jenkins’ 2017 Wonder Woman, an origin story for Diana Prince that relied on the star wattage of a relatively untested Gadot (she’d appeared in three Fast films and a couple of actioners – including Tom Cruise vehicle Knight and Day) to carry the DCEU forward to Justice League. When she launched into the world, Wonder Woman was following in the unremarkable footsteps of Catwoman and Elektra, female-fronted bombs that fed into the pervasive misogynistic view that women could not tempt punters to the box office. As we know, WW smashed its opening weekend with figures that rivalled other hit origin stories (on a par with Iron Man’s BO takings) and ushered in further appearances in a sequel and stablemate outings, most recently in The Flash. That initial triumph encouraged Gadot and Jamie Dornan with director Tom Harper on set 32 | TOTAL FILM | JULY 2023 SUBSCRIBE AT WWW.TOTALFILM.COM/SUBS

Ellison would know the potential of an action franchise. After all, Skydance Media are behind the Mission: Impossible titles (since Ghost Protocol) and Netflix’s recent forays 6 Underground and Ghosted. Where we are with this premise, then: Gadot plays Rachel Stone, a spy who has more secrets than she’s holding for her government bosses and following Gadot to believe that kick-ass onscreen women didn’t need to have superpowers to succeed. ‘I think Wonder Woman was the thing that really gave me the confidence that it’s OK to go dream and produce a movie that is a female-driven action film – a thriller – for everyone to enjoy,’ she recalls. ‘Jaron [Varsano], my husband, who is also my partner in life and in the production company [Pilot Wave] that we’ve had – we had a meeting with David Ellison [CEO of Skydance Media] back in 2017. And at the end of the meeting, he asked me, “What do you want to do?” And I told him, “I want to do this. This is what I want to do.” We shook on it that day, and here we are.’ a mission gone awry, finds herself battling to help The Charter, a shadowy organisation who hold AI supertech in the form of ‘The Heart’. A god’s-eye piece of algorithm software able to dip into all the digital outlets of the world and predict with accuracy the outcomes of certain situations, it’s a Pandora’s box – a force for good in the right hands, a weapon of mass destruction in the wrong ones. When its safety is threatened by a series of players, such as rageful hacker Keya (Alia Bhatt), Stone must rely on her wits and training as she globe-trots – and roundhouse kicks – her way to save it. Along for the ride: Sophie Okonedo’s handler/mother figure, Matthias Schweighöfer’s digi nerd and Jamie Dornan’s fellow spy Parker – a guy whose scarred back and bedroom eyes intrigue Stone more than they should during a job. KEEPING IT REAL Penned by Greg Rucka (who wrote Charlize Theron action vehicle The Old Guard) and Allison Schroeder (whose Hidden Figures showed a skill in showcasing female stories), Heart of Stone is unapologetically set up as the first of a franchise. Rachel is designed with flaws and secrets that could unravel in further adventures, and her very particular skill set could be utilised in other far-flung destinations and situations. And for Gadot, that potential is what makes her first producing gig ‘from ground zero to what it is now’ such a thrill. ‘We had to create a world out of thin air, because we weren’t based on a book series or anything of that sort,’ Gadot enthuses. ‘We had to create the whole universe and the concept, and how do we make it believable and real, so people can connect to it? I wanted to show a great story about a female character who is doing it in the action genre. Right? She is thriving. But at the same time, you know how, many times, they’ve just switched the gender? They take a story that is all about the men, and then they just change it to a woman, and then go shoot it? To me, it was so important in the DNA to make it a little bit different, because men and women are different. They’re built differently, they operate differently.’ Namechecking Die Hard as a touchstone for an imperfect and resourceful character, Gadot wanted her franchise to remain gritty and real while also providing pure audience escapism. ‘I wanted to create a movie that is very global, on a large scope; ‘I wanted to show a great story about a female character in the action genre’ GAL GADOT Gal Gadot as spy Rachel Stone TOTALFILM.COM JULY 2023 | TOTAL FILM | 33 HEART OF STONE

Director Tom Harper with Alia Bhatt, who plays Keya Dhawan, and crew on set Jing Lusi as Yang with Dornan as Parker Bailey (Paul Ready, left) with Stone and the rest of her spy unit in London to make sure we give the audience not just the action and the story and the relationships between the characters, but also the different, beautiful, wild locations.’ So far, so Bond/Mission/Fast. Gadot admits that her Fast family may have helped inspire some of her creative drive in creating a big global world. ‘The biggest thing that I think they are doing brilliantly is to create a story that is not only American-driven. That is not only for the American audiences. But it’s for everybody. If you’re from England, from Brazil, from Thailand, from India, from Israel – everyone has something in this movie. I wasn’t thinking about them when we did the movie. But maybe it is in the DNA of what I’ve learned from them. They want the movie to feel global and big, and that, next time, maybe it’s going to be in Japan – it could be anywhere. And that’s incredible.’ Shooting over several different locations – including Italy, London, Lisbon, Morocco and Iceland – with a huge stunt team, Rachel Stone’s initial outing needed a safe pair of hands to shepherd her to reality. Taken with the female characterisation at the heart of Wild Rose, Gadot met with Tom Harper, who’d just come off filming ballooning biopic The Aeronauts. Though very different projects, Harper can see a correlation between the two. ‘The Aeronauts felt like a sort of stepping stone towards Heart of Stone in some ways,’ says Harper from his London home. The Aeronauts may have been a period drama but it featured highaltitude action and, as with many of his projects, had actors attached very early on in the process. ‘Working with Gal from the very beginning was a really nice way to develop the film. She was intertwined with that character [from the start]. I think when you’re trying to set up a new world, a new film like that, a new project, it’s really useful.’ BOND GAL Setting up a new world in the action arena means looking at the franchises that audiences are already familiar with and trying to key into something different. ‘Obviously I’ve thought about superhero fatigue, and I actually really like superhero movies,’ Harper admits. ‘I just feel like I’ve seen so many of them recently, and I’m not rushing back to see another one. Maybe that taps into the whole feeling of going, “Technology is great, but it’s a tool. We want to use it for some things, but we don’t want it to just exist in a technological world where there’s no grounding and there’s no connection to our humanity.”’ To that end, Gadot and team eschewed CG stunts and action (ahem: hello, dam jump in Fast X) in favour of practical thrills. ‘For me, it becomes less interesting if you can do anything,’ Harper shrugs. ‘So actually, what I think we wanted to achieve was to get back to doing it for real as much as possible, and keeping it grounded, because then there’s real 34 | TOTAL FILM | JULY 2023 COVER STORY

This is your first American feature – why this project? I love the idea that it was headlined by this female superstar. It was a woman-led action film – it’s what makes it compelling in a completely different way, opposed to just a woman being a part of the plan. I’ve worked in Hindi cinema for the last 10 years, and I was prepared to understand that if I was starting afresh in a completely new language, I would not maybe start off with the biggest or the best role. But this was a really good, important role, very well written, and it complemented the other characters really well. How was it working with Gal as team leader on both sides of the camera? I admire her for so many different reasons. She’s someone who continuously challenges the gender ideology that we’re used to, that a woman cannot bring the bums to cinema, you know? She’s done that with Wonder Woman and I admire her mind, her grit. But also the fact that she’s a working mum who is able to balance that life. And even though she was producing and leading the film, I never felt that my opinion, my instinct or my addition didn’t matter. Everything was heard. And I love that about her. How many of the stunts did you get to do for real? It was a little bit more complicated for me because I was pregnant at the time, so I had to be extremely careful. So a lot of the stuff, like wire work, I had to pick up after I’d had the baby, because it wasn’t safe. Luckily, I didn’t have any morning sickness, and Gal would keep checking on me: ‘Are you OK? Do you need any food? Do you need any water?’ You were in RRR – what do you think of it becoming such a hit? It’s great. But also not surprising to me, because I come from a country that is so rich in its culture and its people. So when a film like RRR connects all over the world, especially with the American audience, it’s amazing because it just shows how language is no barrier. It’s just the power of storytelling, of emotion. And the fact that I got to be a part of [director] Rajamouli’s process was the greatest reward. Do you want to do more Englishlanguage films after this experience? I’d love to do way more English-language movies: action, romance, comedy, thriller, a happy slice-of-life family journey film… I have a list of movies that I would love to do, and a list of filmmakers that I’d love to work with. I hope it’s just the beginning. JC ALIA BHATT The Bollywood superstar talks girl power stakes [involved]. If you really believe these characters are going through it, and it’s not an impossible thing they’re doing, that then takes you into a different world of superhumans. Of course, it’s a little bit heightened because of the nature of things that happen. But it was really our ambition to keep it connected to reality. We never wanted to do something that felt like it wouldn’t be possible. And in order to achieve that, everything we did do, we did for real.’ Bringing in former stunt performer turned coordinator Rob Alonzo as second unit director (he just worked second unit on The Batman) and stunt coordinator Jo McLaren (see boxout on page 39), Harper brainstormed action sequences that felt fresh to viewers who’ll see Rome’s Spanish Steps trashed in two vehicle chases through two different franchises this summer. That process delivered an opening chase down a southern Tyrol mountain - via sliding, speed-flying paragliding, snow bike and on foot – as the sun sets into darkness, a smash-and-grab van chase (much of it in reverse) through the cobbled streets of Lisbon complete with trams, a HALO jump to fisticuffs among the sand dunes and a hair-raising motorbike sequence along a stark Reykjavik road. Movies are usually filmed out of order, but the first sequence to be nailed was the opener – where Stone and her colleague discover their quarry could be getting away from a swish ski lodge. ‘I really wanted it to be at night, because there’s plenty of snow sequences in action films, but what I feel I’ve seen very rarely is it at night,’ says Harper. ‘That beginning was all about maintaining [that approach]. But, of course, everyone was worried about spending all this money, and going through all this inconvenience – one being the mountain in the first place, where the weather can change and can totally screw you. And two, we were worried about going there, and it just being pitch black, and you could be anywhere if it’s night!’ Shooting during a tight 45-minute ‘It was really our ambition to keep it connected to reality’ TOM HARPER TOTALFILM.COM JULY 2023 | TOTAL FILM | 35

What was the attraction of Heart of Stone? I’ve never done anything on such a big scale. I’ve never done anything that’s like a spy-action thriller. I have a real attitude in this career to experience all of it. ‘The Heart’ is a superweapon that can predict the future. Does technology, with the pace it’s developing, scare you? Yeah. I think ‘ominous’ is probably the word. But, you know, it’s like a lot of things: there is good that could be done and there’s bad. I guess the reality is that things like greed exist, and there are people who would want to control something this powerful, and there’d be maybe disastrous consequences. Gal Gadot is your producer and co-star. How did you find working with her? There’s nobody like Gal Gadot. She’s totally on her own in terms of the movies that she’s making and the ambition she’s making them with. It’s an exciting thing to be around. And she’s very fucking down-to-earth and cool and easy to be around. Your character, Parker, is highly skilled. What training did you have? I’ve done a fair amount of stunt work in my time. I love all that aspect of it. The physicality of it. I still feel relatively young and physically capable, and while I feel like that, I want to exploit that where I can, and have fun with that, because I enjoy it. How much of the stunt work did you do for real? I tried to do a lot of it. I’m a really stubborn little prick! I’ve literally just come from a stunt rehearsal for a big fight I have on Series 2 of The Tourist, which I’m shooting at the moment. I’m probably not going to do all the stuff that Tom Cruise does. I’m not going to motorcycle off the side of a mountain and release my parachute. But saying that, I’ve never been asked to do that [laughs]. Some people have talked about this as a female Mission: Impossible-style movie. Do you agree? Yeah, I recognise that, definitely. I think there’s an appetite to make more with Gal. I think she’s someone who is very much up to that task and will hold an audience for plenty more films. She’s just really good at it. Finally, your name has been floated as the next James Bond. Is this a calling card to Barbara Broccoli? [Laughs] I don’t know if Barbara has a Netflix account! I’ve been in that conversation for a good couple of years now. Sometimes I’m more in that conversation than other times. It tends to be if you have a movie coming out. I imagine that if people are making noise about this film when it comes out on Netflix, and hopefully lots of people are watching it, then you enter that conversation again in a bigger way than you were before the movie came out. If people want to have your name, that’s cool. I just am not one of those people who give it a huge amount of thought. JAMES MOTTRAM JAMIE DORNAN On stunts, Gal Gadot and the possibility of playing James Bond 36 | TOTAL FILM | JULY 2023

Dornan/Parker: neither shaken nor stirred Sophie Okonedo as Nomad/King of Hearts and Matthias Schweighöfer as Jack of Hearts Alia Bhatt as Keya in the Moroccan desert Stone fighting dark forces in a Lisbon safe house window each night, when darkness had just fallen but an alpine glow meant the mountains could still be seen, set the tone of the shoot for Harper and the team. ‘With everything being possible nowadays, the things that make it feel real can be subtle, but they make all the difference – those final few percentage points. If you’re there, and the crew are cold, and feel it, and you know that it’s frosty, and you can see their breath, and you know that the light is going so you need to move quickly – that puts an energy into it. There are all those sort of things, the just-added flavour that you couldn’t recreate if you were in a studio.’ It wasn’t just below-freezing temperatures the project dealt with. Filming in Morocco may have evoked images of Lawrence of Arabia and its dunes, but when the production arrived, a sandstorm and wildly swinging temperatures made the work harder. ‘We’d gone all that way to Morocco for it to be beautiful and sunny – and we had this sandstorm. But actually, again, that’s the human element. I thought, “I’ve seen the desert before in glorious sun. That bitty, gravelly, dusty feel – I actually think it works for us much better.” So, again, it turns it into a positive. But, yeah, we did break down in the middle of the desert, in the middle of a sandstorm…’ For Gadot, trying to ensure she did as many of the stunts as possible was paramount to maintaining the believability of her character. And despite her experience in action, getting beaten up was still a slog. ‘It’s always difficult,’ she laughs. ‘You never really get used to it. But at one point, you let go. You let go of that side of the brain, and you just commit to the process. To me, it’s important to do it as much as I can, just because I feel like the emotion is always connected to the action that we’re doing. And it’s not just simply a clean action performance. It’s also affected by the emotion, the state of mind of the character and all of that. Obviously, some of it I wasn’t able to do because they wouldn’t insure ‘Ostensibly, this is a big, entertaining action film... but films of all genres tap into social themes and trends’ TOM HARPER me. So I did as much as I could with the support of the crazy-ass things done by the stuntwoman.’ Despite her wire work as Wonder Woman, Gadot found the rig she had to strap into to essay plummeting through the heavens in a skydiving stunt was something of a pain in the (kick)ass. ‘The rigs that we had to use, and how limiting they were to the body, physically, was really hard on me,’ she groans of the contraption that dangles performers on a wire while strapped into a tight sleeping bag-like harness. ‘And to do it for a long period of time, and multiple times, that was the hardest thing for me.’ SPECIAL AGENCY Though the production tried to steer away from over-reliance on CGI, the gadget at the centre of the film taps into our dependence on tech and how it might control us more than we control it. A timely conundrum, says Gadot, that makes Heart of Stone feel relatable to audiences despite the global scope of ‘The Heart’. ‘It’s really relevant, the whole AI power in the world. And the idea of who’s controlling the AI and the ethics around it.’ ‘I think that’s really what the message of the story is,’ Harper agrees. ‘AI is an incredible tool and will be beneficial in so many ways, but it does need very careful handling and careful decision-making around its use to ensure that it’s used in the most responsible way. Ostensibly, this is a big, entertaining action film, but films of all genres do tap into social themes and trends that are current, and explore them. Big data, AI, how we use technology and how we maintain our humanity through that is something, as a society, we’re really grappling with at the moment.’ Speaking of algorithms, Heart of Stone will debut on Netflix and the streaming service is looking for franchise potential. The Old Guard has a follow-up in the works, The Gray Man is in the early stages of a sequel and Extraction boasts a second instalment already on the platform. What might we expect from future missions for Rachel Stone? ‘I hope that people like it, and want to keep watching it and watch it all the way through. That’s step one,’ Harper chuckles, under no illusions about the way content is consumed on the system. Gadot has more skin in the game as the originator of this fledgling franchise. ‘The objective was to do a great first film and to take it from JULY 2023 | TOTAL FILM | 37 HEART OF STONE

‘To me, starting and developing stories that I’m passionate about is an incredible thing’ GAL GADOT there,’ she says. ‘But if I was lucky enough to continue and explore her character, I would look at these things as chapters in the character’s life. And in this one, if she was going from a place of loneliness – learning how to trust others and how to operate as a team – I think the next one has to be the next chapter of a different trait in her personality, in the journey that she has to go through.’ And also loads of ballsy stunts and globetrotting? ‘Always!’ For Gadot, though, this is also about developing as an artist. And given the recent news from DC under the a chapter,’ she says diplomatically of where she is right now. ‘I’m living it right now. To me, starting and developing stories that I’m passionate about is an incredible thing. The fact that I don’t have to sit still at home and just wait for the next offer is something that makes me feel empowered. And I enjoy doing it, it keeps me alive. I’m not only going to do my own projects, I’m going to work as an actress-for-hire still. But the fact that I can go ahead and tell the stories that I’m passionate about – from ideas that I conceived, or from ideas that I find fascinating from stewardship of James Gunn and the cancellation of Wonder Woman 3, perhaps this is the series she’ll take forward instead of the adventures of the Themyscira goddess? ‘Well, it’s Rachel Stone (Gadot) in a high-altitude, highly explosive moment 38 | TOTAL FILM | JULY 2023 SUBSCRIBE AT WWW.TOTALFILM.COM/SUBS COVER STORY

NETFLIX The intense car chase in Lisbon must have also been a challenge? Narrow, cobbled streets that are full of trams and hills and tight corners… The van [that Gadot drives] had to be reinforced to be able to cope with what we were going to be asked to do. We used the trams in some of the sequences and we had some of the best drivers in the world. We would rehearse out of location – any of the specifics, any of the near-misses, the crashes – and then we would get on location, and rehearse it, have pre-vis, map everything out with toy cars, and allocate different drivers with their skill set. How many cars did you destroy? Yeah, quite a few [laughs]. But we only destroyed the ones we were meant to destroy. How would you characterise the action in Heart of Stone compared to the worlds of Bond, Mission, Fast? It does have tones of Bond and the Mission films, in terms of the scale of the action. But our action is possibly more grounded in story terms. I think audiences will be really excited by the diverse sequences that we have. It’s trying to create something new and something we haven’t seen, and that is using all the skill of the filmmakers that we have. I can’t think of a movie where they use Lisbon. We’re in a proper, old city with all the history and the crazy roads there. Is it as much fun as it looks? It’s a great career, really exciting. There’s very little glamour, but a lot of hard work and graft. It takes its toll on your body. A lot of ice baths and arnica! But the industry needs more women. We’ve got such great, diverse scripts now. But we are crying out for really good women in different fields. Trying to find good women on motorbikes is hard. Come on, girls! JC WHAM, BAM, THANK YOU, MA’AM Stunt coordinator Jo McLaren talks ice baths and big set-pieces people that want to partner with us – it’s an incredible thing.’ She checks herself as though worried that she may seem arrogant to be so self-assured. ‘That I can make projects happen is something that I’m so grateful for and I am definitely going to continue that because it’s worth it. I’m very, very excited and humbly proud,’ she laughs. Total Film suggests she shouldn’t have to be humble about ambition. Rachel Stone certainly wouldn’t be… HEART OF STONE IS AVAILABLE ON NETFLIX FROM 11 AUGUST. What did you think when you were approached to coordinate the stunts? I loved the fact that it was a female, strong lead. She wasn’t a snowflake. She was really badass, highly intelligent and beautiful. The whole premise was to keep the action very real. To engage the audience, but keep it really grounded, real and to feel the pain of each character whatever situation they found themselves in. Is it different planning these things when it’s a female lead? Not necessarily, because she’s a highly trained double agent. But I guess it was always keeping an element of femininity – you don’t have to be masculine to be badass. But if she was up fighting somebody particularly big or strong, she would be more skilful and have more technique than necessarily having more strength. Gal is a seasoned pro with action sequences. She already has all of that muscle memory in her, just from years of doing the action. How did you manage pulling off stunts up a snowy mountain, at night? We brought on a brilliant extreme-sports guy from Red Bull, J.T. Holmes, who’s just fantastic. And we tried to do as much as we could, all for real, out on location. For that sequence you’re dealing with extreme temperatures and the logistics; a limited time frame to use the gondola, the ski lifts, the slopes. You can’t get cranes up there and all the equipment had to be ferried up either on the lifts or on snowmobiles. But it’s exciting to be able to do those sequences, actually on location, and to not just be on a blue or green screen. Harper puts Gadot through her paces on set TOTALFILM.COM JULY 2023 | TOTAL FILM | 39 HEART OF STONE

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J O N AT H A N C R O C K E R , J O N AT H A N D E A N , J A M I E G R A H A M , K E V I N H A R L E Y, L E I L A L AT I F, M AT T H E W L E Y L A N D , A N D Y L O W E , J A M E S M O T T R A M , N E I L S M I T H, KIM TAYLOR-FOSTER, CERI THOMAS, JAMES WHITE With Gal Gadot, Tom Cruise, Rosario Dawson, Chris Hemsworth and more putting life and limb in great danger and pushing fight scenes to the limit in high-octane entertainment this summer, Total Film hails the most cunning stunts of all time. 42 | TOTAL FILM | JULY 2023 SUBSCRIBE AT WWW.TOTALFILM.COM/SUBS

WINGING IT TRANSFORMERS: DARK OF THE MOON (2011) 25‘I gotta have wingsuits in Transformers 3.’ So said Michael Bay after watching skydivers Julian Boulle and J.T. Holmes do their thing on TV. Used to mountains, they’d never navigated a cityscape, much less one like Chicago. ‘Skipping breakfast, going straight to launch,’ said Holmes on shoot day. Well, you’re not keeping bacon and eggs down, are you? Five Bell-Boeing V-22 Ospreys take to the sky, led by Josh Duhamel’s Colonel Lennox. Pursued by Decepticons, the strike team jump. Gliding in formation, the wingsuiters whip through the air, spiders on the wind, evading bogeys as they navigate steel and concrete. Despite the CG villains, the danger of the real stunt still impresses. Pure unadulterated Bayhem. PLANE TALKING TENET (2020) 24 Outrageous, even by Christopher Nolan’s standards: a hijacked 747 tears through Oslo airport, crushing cars in its wake before pancaking a hangar. Nolan insisted on doing it all for real, sending the production team to Southern California Logistics Airport in Victorville. A physics expert was brought in to calculate when to apply the brakes before smashing the aircraft into a loading bay built by production designer Nathan Crowley’s team. The plane was towed by a tug driven by Jim Wilkey, the stunt driver who’d flipped the Joker’s truck on The Dark Knight. ‘It was a huge undertaking for everybody involved,’ says stunt coordinator George Cottle. No kidding. 23 DOUBLE IMPACT RRR (2022) Two become one in S.S. Rajamouli’s action bromance. Kneecapped by guards while imprisoned, Raju (Ram Charan) cannot walk. When Bheem (N.T. Rama Rao Jr) frees him, Raju springs onto his rescuer’s shoulders to form a four-armed super-soldier. Recalling a friendship montage from earlier in the film, the piggyback fight bursts with feeling. But it’s also a blistering display of extraordinarily choreographed combat, as Raju wields two rifles and Bheem barrels through opponents before the mountain-of-man duo climb a tower and backflip onto the top, shooting soldiers mid-leap. ‘I had to keep running like that for six or seven hours a day,’ said Rama Rao, turning his pains into extravagant action gains. 22 FIREBIRD IN THE SKY SMOKEY AND THE BANDIT (1977) Even after all these decades, it’s hard not to share in Sally Field’s elation as Burt Reynolds’ Bandit flies his Pontiac Firebird Trans Am over Georgia’s Flint River in the film’s most famous scene. In reality, though, it was director Hal Needham and Field’s stand-in Lada St. Edmund who were in the car: a modified model with a 750HP engine and a booster rocket powerful enough to send it soaring over the collapsed Mulberry Bridge with room to spare. ‘We built a ramp, put a big engine in and said go for it,’ Needham explained in 2007. There was no second take, though, as the vehicle disintegrated on impact. LEAP OF FAITH DIE HARD (1988) 21 Anchored with a fire hose wrapped around his waist, police detective John McClane jumps from the Nakatomi Plaza roof just as villainous Hans Gruber detonates a ton of explosions. Always up for a dare, Bruce Willis performed the leap from a parking structure on the 20th Century Fox backlot into an airbag 25ft below. Mortars were set off, while Willis’ back was padded and his skin protected with heat-resistant gel. The actor could be heard shouting ‘Goddamn you!’ at special-effects supervisor Al DiSarro as he jumped, and no wonder. As he recalled: ‘The force of the explosion blew me out to the very edge of the airbag.’ Yippee ki-yay, indeed. JAILBIRD ON A WIRE THE GREAT ESCAPE (1963) 20It was a lunge into legend: Steve McQueen’s Cooler King escaping from a German prisoner-of-war camp on a motorbike. The film’s original ending involved a runaway train, then McQueen had it changed to big himself up – although the rider was actually big Mac’s stuntman buddy Bud Ekins. After Ekins and colleagues dug a makeshift ramp out of a valley, McQueen tried the jump and landed on the fence. ‘Could have bust my melon,’ he said. Ekins then dredged up dust clouds with back-straining practice jumps, before clearing the barbed wire (actually a rather less impressive concoction of string and rubber bands) at 65mph on a 650cc Triumph in one take. Lift off! TOTALFILM.COM JULY 2023 | TOTAL FILM | 43 GREATEST STUNTS

19 SPIN CITY BABY DRIVER (2017) The titular music-loving wheelman (Ansel Elgort) times his getaways to his tunes in Edgar Wright’s tyre-squealing heist movie. The opening escape cut to the stuttering sonics of The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion’s Bellbottoms is hard to beat – especially the bit where Baby’s red Subaru WRX jackknifes around a reversing truck by spin-skidding first one way, then the other. ‘We call it a 180 in and 180 out,’ says second unit director Darrin Prescott. ‘It was nerve-racking. If the stunt driver stacked it into the building…’ Big breath. ‘A different movie would make it on green screen.’ Wright shot 95% in-camera, on the streets of Atlanta. ‘It feels real because it is real,’ he says. 18 WHEELS ON FIRE THE VILLAINESS (2017) Steel and wheels clash in the rubberburning chase sequence from Jung Byung-gil’s South Korean actioner. Assassin Sook-hee (Kim Ok-bin) engages her assailants with katanas on motorbikes, blades clanging and engines roaring. ‘I would say pretty much all the movie was shot in real life,’ says Jung. Some of the passing cars were computer-generated but the rest was shot in-camera, using a rig with three bikes attached and cameras hooked up to helmets. Smaller-than-usual cameras also enabled Jung to shoot from multiple impossible angles, the POV swerving and swooping dynamically. The result is a fully revved miracle of momentum, immediacy and originality: John Wick 3’s bike-based bust-up owes it a debt. RAPID DESCENT DELIVERANCE (1972) 15 A key scene in John Boorman’s survivalist classic sees two canoes collide at the crest of a waterfall, flipping one of their oarsmen into the churning whirlpool below. When a cloth dummy proved too clothdummyish, Burt Reynolds gamely volunteered to take its place. ‘I went over the falls, hit a rock and cracked my tailbone,’ he would later remember. ‘It was a hairy stunt and a dumb thing to do.’ Ned Beatty would also feel the force of the Chattooga River’s fearsome flows. ‘One day Ned didn’t come up for two minutes,’ Boorman recalls. ‘I always had the fear I was going to lose one of the cast.’ POLE POSITION POLICE STORY (1985) 16Jackie Chan has suffered for his art so many times, it would be quicker to list the bones he hasn’t broken. Yet even he could not have imagined how painful it would be to slide down a metal pole draped with mains-powered Christmas lights at the end of Police Story’s epic shopping-mall climax. ‘That 10 seconds left me with second-degree burns on my hands, a bloody face and fragments of sugar glass all over my body,’ he would later recall. Not only that but the stunt’s final flourish – a fall through 600lbs of glass and a wooden hut’s roof – added a dislocated pelvis to his list of injuries. HANGIN’ TOUGH SAFETY LAST! (1923) 14 And all for a girl: Harold Lloyd, the boater-and-specs-wearing king of crackers comedy, climbs a skyscraper and hangs from a clockface en route. And with only eight fingers, too, given that he’d blown two off years earlier by messing about with a bomb. But did he dangle? Really? Well, close-ups were shot using facades on rooftops and cameras were placed to make him look higher than he was. But he was still high. ‘We had platforms, with mattresses, about 20ft down... on the highest building we could find in Los Angeles,’ Lloyd said. ‘From up there, they looked like postage stamps…’ STAIRWAY TO MAYHEM ATOMIC BLONDE (2017) 17For his directorial debut, stunt coordinator David Leitch stepped up his pitch for a seeming oner, influenced by Children of Men’s grungy style. Charlize Theron convinced him she could nail the Berlin stairwell scrap, a dirty dust-up bristling with punch-drunk immediacy. Filmed over four days, the scene comprises multiple cuts shot chronologically using handheld cameras; Leitch worked tightly with DoP Jonathan Sela and editor Elísabet Ronaldsdóttir to smooth over the cuts, using whip-pans and wipes. Stuntwoman Monique Ganderton doubled for some tumbles but Theron did most of the scrapping. Drawing on her ballet training for the choreography, Theron was, says Leitch, ‘committed to finding the reality of the situation’. Let’s dance. 44 | TOTAL FILM | JULY 2023 SUBSCRIBE AT WWW.TOTALFILM.COM/SUBS TF LIST

12 FULL MAST DEATH PROOF (2007) Stunt performers are usually the unsung heroes of cinema, but Quentin Tarantino made them both the heroes and the villain. Kurt Russell’s stuntman is murdering women using his ‘death proof’ car, but he fails to anticipate the skills of stunt icon Zoë Bell (playing herself). Bell shows off her skills with a game called Ship’s Mast, riding the hood of a 1970 Dodge Challenger as the car races down dusty roads. Bell would later explain, ‘People have such a visceral response to that sequence because there is no bullshit. There’s no double, there’s no CGI, it’s all practical.’ Despite 100mph speeds and an opportunistic serial killer, Bell proves to be genuinely death-proof. DAM FINE GOLDENEYE (1995) 11 With one jump, Pierce Brosnan established that his James Bond would be a more daring, dynamic and blockbusterfriendly incarnation compared to the gruff charm embodied by his predecessor Timothy Dalton. He joins 006 (Sean Bean) by leaping off a gargantuan dam and dropping into a Soviet chemical weapons facility 220m below with a near-preternatural level of cool. The stunt itself was performed by British stuntman/coordinator Wayne Michaels and, by his account, it ‘had never been done before’. As a result, there was ‘a trauma clinic ready and an emergency helicopter to rush me to hospital’. But Michaels only needed one take and emerged unscathed, and a new Bond was born. POLE STARS MAD MAX: FURY ROAD (2015) 09‘George [Miller] always imagined that we’d have to use CGI for safety’s sake, but it was my dream to do it for real,’ says action unit director Guy Norris, who first teamed with Miller on 1981’s Mad Max 2. He’s talking about the final chase, as the War Rig races towards the Citadel and is swarmed by high-speed, souped-up vehicles sporting nutters swinging on 40ft rods. Inspired by Cirque du Soleil’s Chinese pole routines, it took eight weeks to ready the stunt performers. ‘I thought it was too dangerous,’ admits Miller. ‘But they worked out the physics of the pendulum. One day I looked up, and coming across the desert were all these guys on poles.’ HOT-FOOTING IT ONG-BAK (2003) 10So many stunts to choose from, so little space. Forced to plump for just one of Tony Jaa’s heroics, however, and it has to be the scene where his lethal action man Ting battles assorted goons at a burning petrol station. Why? Because Ting uses his legs – which are on fire, it should be said – to kick seven flaming bells out of the baddies. ‘During that scene, my eyelashes and the hairs on my arms got burned,’ notes Jaa. ‘On the first take, it wouldn’t burn because they didn’t have enough oil on. Then they put on more oil and it came up all the way to my head.’ Toasty. WINDOW DROPPING STEAMBOAT BILL, JR. (1928) 08 No CGI. No stunt doubles. Just vision, wit and nerves of steel. In Buster Keaton’s most spectacular movie, a giant cyclone sends the complete side of a building crashing down on him – only for Buster to survive by virtue of an open window that fits neatly around him. ‘We built the window so that I had a clearance of two inches on each shoulder,’ he remembered. ‘The top missed my head by two inches.’ Half the crew walked off the set rather than participate in a stunt that should probably have killed Keaton. ‘It’s a one-take scene and we got it. You don’t do those things twice…’ 13 FALLING DOWN BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID (1969) Legendary screenwriter William Goldman called it ‘the most important scene of my life. Everything good that has come out of my relationship with Hollywood was because of it.’ You know what he’s talking about – that classic stunt when Paul Newman and Robert Redford elude a marauding posse by hurling themselves off a ravine into the water below. The stunt was done in two parts. In Colorado, the stars leapt off a ledge on to a mattress (the hard bit); the rest was shot at Fox’s Century Ranch near Malibu, where two stuntmen jumped into a lake from a 70ft crane, masked on film by a matte painting. The moment perfectly captured the laid-back cool of these icons of the era, becoming almost as memorable as the sepia-toned finale (without the bittersweet, er, bloodbath). TOTALFILM.COM JULY 2023 | TOTAL FILM | 45 GREATEST STUNTS

05 ’CHUTE TO THRILL THE SPY WHO LOVED ME (1977) Roger Moore is king of the Bond opener, but it was stuntman Rick Sylvester who plummeted from atop Canada’s 2,015m Mount Asgard. ‘Pull out immediately,’ comes M’s order. Bond leaves his latest conquest alone in a mountain cabin. Pursued by bad guys, he hurtles down the slope, gliding off the precipice as if the snow is still beneath his skis. The music stops, accounting for the strains of our collective thumping heart. A somersault, skis ejected, a skydive position. Out unfurls the Union Flag-bedecked canopy of a parachute as the 007 theme tune plays. Opening lower than expected, and hit by an errant ski, Bond and Sylvester were neither shaken, nor stirred. 02 HORSE PLAY STAGECOACH (1939) Teaming Johns Ford and Wayne in their first indelible movie masterpiece, this landmark oater also captures stunt legend Yakima Canutt’s finest work. He doubles for Duke when his character, the Ringo Kid, hopscotches across the horses pulling the speeding stage. But the show-stealer comes moments earlier when Canutt, this time as an Apache, leaps from his mount (at 45mph!) on to the lead horses. Capped by Ringo, he falls beneath the hooves. Grasping the rig’s ‘tongue’, he’s dragged along until another bullet persuades him to let go, the six steeds and stage hurtling over his body. STRETCHING THE TRUTH TRUE LIES (1994) 07 Dangling Jamie Lee Curtis’ stunt double from a helicopter skid was the easy part. Harder was dropping her into the sunroof of a speeding limousine, then yanking her out again in the 8.5-second window before said limo nosedives off a bridge. The point of no return was marked with cones. ‘The speed was real, because you can’t do it slowly,’ Curtis recently reflected on the experience. When ‘Action!’ was called, they managed to get stuntwoman Donna Keegan in just as they passed the cones - and out as the limo’s wheels tipped over the edge. In doc Stuntwomen: The Untold Hollywood Story, Keegan calls it an out-of-body experience. A BRIDGE TOO FAR THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING (1975) 04Even action supremo Vic Armstrong bows his head to this drop from a rope bridge in the Sean Connery-Michael Caine classic. Shot above a ravine in Morocco, the fall was ‘only’ 90ft to a pile of boxes on a ledge - with a fatal plummet if Connery’s double missed. Assorted stuntmen bottled it before Joe Powell stepped up. ‘Joe fell so skilfully, twisting and turning on the way down, and at the very last minute straightening himself out so that he hit the mattresses dead centre,’ wrote Michael Caine later. ‘John Huston turned to me and said, “That was the darndest stunt I’ve ever seen.”’ CHOPPER FLOPPER HOOPER (1978) 06 Doubling for Burt Reynolds (a mainstay of classic 70s stunts) in Hal Needham’s action comedy, stuntmaster A.J. Bakunas set a new world record for the highest jump without a parachute by throwing himself out of a helicopter on to an airbag located 232ft below. ‘Some people say I’m crazy to keep doing stunts.’ he said. ‘I don’t think it’s any crazier than working eight hours a day in a stuffy office.’ The following year, A.J. tried to go one better by leaping off a 300ft construction site for 1979’s Steel. The jump went fine, but the airbag split on impact, killing him instantly as his father looked on. DRAG KING RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK (1981) 03 Raiders was conceived as a tribute to 30s and 40s action-adventure cinema. So it’s only fitting that, at the height of the film’s eight-minute truck chase, there’s a tip of the fedora to Yakima Canutt’s crowning moment in Stagecoach (see #2). After leaping aboard the Nazi wagon holding the Ark, Indy crashes through the windscreen. Falling beneath the truck, he’s then dragged behind it, trusty bullwhip lashed to the axle. It’s a trick stuntman Terry Leonard tried to pull on 1981’s The Legend of the Lone Ranger without success. This time he nailed it, with help from stunt coordinator Glenn Randall (the driver) plus a shallow trench that allowed Leonard to literally keep his head when he slipped under the truck. ‘I was lucky enough to get the one everybody thought was the most dangerous,’ he said. 46 | TOTAL FILM | JULY 2023 SUBSCRIBE AT WWW.TOTALFILM.COM/SUBS TF LIST

AL AMY, GET T Y PLANE SAILING CLIFFHANGER (1993) 01It must have looked great in the script. Robbers cross from one jet plane to another in mid-air via a cable. Fantastic! Now all the stuntmen have to do is work out how to do it... Appearing in The Guinness Book of Records as the most expensive aerial stunt ever attempted (Sylvester Stallone dropped his fee for the movie so that the budget could stretch to the $1m price tag), the manoeuvre was shot at 15,000 feet over the Rocky Mountains using jets moving at 150 knots - any slower and they would have stalled. Brit stunt legend Simon Crane climbed the wire from a DC-9 to a smaller Jetstar. Despite delays, with the cable snagging around the second jet’s wing, Crane made it across, but as he tried to enter the other plane, the wind dragged him loose. He bounced along the top of the plane, narrowly missed being sucked into the engine, and disappeared over the tail. His concealed chute saved him and director Renny Harlin wisely decided not to ask for a retake, instead using clever editing to make it look like Crane made it. ‘Probably the hardest stunt I’ve ever done,’ Crane later told TF. ‘Everything was going fine, then the plane came in quickly and hit me. I’m probably the only person to be hit by a flying jet and survive - although it did hit me at a relative speed of 3mph, because we were already doing 170mph on the other plane.’ MISSION IN ACTION ETHAN HUNT’S FINEST MOMENTS… TRAIN CRAZY MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE, 1996 Yes, Tom Cruise really did shoot on top of a moving TGV train for M:I 1. A skydiving simulator was used to distort his face, creating the illusion he was travelling at high speed. ROTARY CLUB MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – FALLOUT, 2018 Yes, Tom Cruise really did hang off a flying helicopter’s payload for Fallout’s aerial finale. Stunt coordinator Wade Eastwood feared the star had broken his back when he dropped on the chopper’s cargo. HALO AND GOODBYE MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – FALLOUT, 2018 Yes, Tom Cruise really did jump out of a C-17 military aircraft for Fallout’s High Altitude Low Opening sequence. More than 100 jumps were made above the UAE to get the shots needed. GET A GRIP MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – ROGUE NATION, 2015 Yes, Tom Cruise really was strapped to the side of an Airbus A400M Atlas as it took off from RAF Wittering. ‘I did it eight times to get the shot,’ he reveals. DUBAI ON HIGH MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – GHOST PROTOCOL, 2011 Yes, Tom Cruise really did dangle off the exterior of Dubai’s Burj Khalifa for Brad Bird’s series rebooter. ‘We ended up breaking 35 windows,’ the director says of the Safety Last!-inspired sequence. TOTALFILM.COM JULY 2023 | TOTAL FILM | 47

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An elite team, comprising people with their own unique set of skills, guided by a charismatic leader on a  quest of seemingly insurmountable odds… Sound familiar? Total Film meets the key creative powerhouses crafting Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One into a tour de force of tension and suspense. WORDS MATT MAYTUM There’s one achievement that’s perhaps more jawdropping than any of the extreme stunts that star/producer Tom Cruise has completed. And it’s that - in a world of IP fatigue and diminishing returns - Mission: Impossible is a rare (unique?) franchise that’s managed to keep getting better. The biggest challenge that two-part epic Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning faces is living up to its predecessor, 2018’s Fallout - the hands-down best film in the series, and the highest-grosser, too. Dead Reckoning Part One opens this summer, and finds Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt and his IMF team on a mission to stop a potentially catastrophic weapon falling into the wrong hands. As well as the likes of Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) and Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg) returning, a figure from Hunt’s past is back in the form of Henry Czerny’s Eugene Kittridge (last seen in the first Mission: Impossible movie, back in 1996), and new threats are played by Esai Morales and Pom Klementieff. Writer/director and long-time Cruise collaborator Christopher McQuarrie returns for the third (and fourth) time here, and once again he’ll be balancing globe-hopping scale and increasingly breathtaking stunts (car chases! Locomotive smackdowns! Motorcycle cliff leaps!), but, as he tells Total Film, he’s increasingly fixated on Ethan’s inner emotional journey. TF meets McQuarrie and key filmmaking allies - editor Eddie Hamilton, composer Lorne Balfe and music supervisor Cecile Tournesac - for a masterclass on crafting a crowd-pleasing spectacle under intense pressure, and to find out how their biggest competition is themselves. JULY 2023 | TOTAL FILM | 49 MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE

TESTING TIMES ‘We’re actually big believers in [test screenings]. I actually lean into it. I’ve been asked, “Don’t you ever just go with your gut?” And my answer to that is, “Yes, we do that every day.” Invariably, the audience is there to tell you whether or not you are communicating what you intended to communicate. ‘My education in film goes back to working as a security guard at a movie theatre for four years, and listening to the audience. The audience was extremely vocal. And I didn’t realise it at the time, but I was basically going to work every night with the world’s largest focus group. ‘An audience is infinitely smarter than you. They’ve seen more movies than you. They have you outnumbered. An audience is always going to tell you how they feel. What they can’t do is tell you how to fix the story. The analogy I use all the time is that if you were a doctor, and the patient told you he had a pain in his arm, that’s a possible indication of a heart attack. Amputating the arm is not going to solve the heart attack [laughs]. ‘It isn’t that you’re obligated [to act on the feedback]. And ultimately, we go with what we think is a good movie. So it starts with our gut, and ends with our gut.’ EMOTION PICTURE ‘It’s funny: the movies have developed a reputation of just being an excuse to do a bunch of stunts, which I kind of laugh at. The truth of the matter is, we focus more and more on emotion, and emotional arcs, and emotional character dynamics. Obviously, it’s a spy movie. It exists in a heightened world of espionage. And it’s going to have action in it. ‘But primarily, I’m approaching everything emotionally. The effect that [the franchise has] had on my process is such that the frame itself has to be emotional. The way I place the camera, based on whether I’m shooting an actor’s performance or someone holding a set of car keys or a foot on a gas pedal – they’re all things that you can shoot in such a way that they are either information or they are emotion. ‘Dialogue, no matter how emotionally expressed it is, if the camera is not in the right place, it’s just a person saying words emotionally. Which is really information. So what we talk about with our actors and with key members of the crew, is the lens and the frame, and how to create an emotional relationship between the actor and the lens.’ CHARACTER BUILDING ‘With Fallout and both parts of Dead Reckoning, we became focused on Ethan’s inner emotional WRITER/DIRECTOR CHRISTOPHER McQUARRIE ON TENSION, TEST SCREENINGS AND TOM. AS TOLD TO MATT MAYTUM Hayley Atwell joins the franchise as Grace (left) SUBSCRIBE AT WWW.TOTALFILM.COM/SUBS MASTERCLASS