DAN’S MOVIE DIGEST 16

CHARLIE’S ANGELS 2

Director McG was recently interviewed by ‘Coming Attractions’. Here iswhat he had to say about next year’s Summer release “Charlie’s Angels2′:

Q: Does this [sequel] have more adrenaline than the first one?

McG: Yeah, you can see the whole idea with this is obviously all the funand the beauty and the sexiness is very much still intact which is whatyou see in the little short clips that come at the end of the piece, butwhat we all wanted to do when we got together was just make it decidedlymore muscular, more masculine and show that these are girls that canhang with the boys and do their thing, just play on that action levelthat anybody can play on. That’s what we’re trying to bring andrepresent.

Q: Do you explain how Bernie Mac is Bosley [and not Bill Murray]?

McG: It’s handled subtly. I think that you’re in for a very interestingtreat in respect to the legacy of the Bosley’s so to speak. We addressthat, it’s fun and we have a little bit of fun with where everybody camefrom.

Q: Tell us about Pink’s involvement?

McG: Yeah, she’s just someone who we’re all a fan of. The movie’spro-everybody. It’s pro-ethnicity; it’s pro-men, its pro-women. It’slike everybody just be the best you can be and do your thing. We alljust got together and creatively felt that Pink was someone whopersonified pulling yourself up by your bootstraps and getting out thereand doing your thing, and being as sexy as you want to be and as toughas you want to be and doing what you believe in.

So, we were thrilled to have her as part of it and she’s a part of themotocross sequence. Her boyfriend’s one of the top freestyle guys in theworld who’s out there at the X-games, upside down and backwards, blowingup, walking with a limp and a broken collarbone but still going outthere and making it happen. So, she seemed right for the picture.

Q: And Demi Moore’s involvement?

McG: We conceived that character from day one, I was working with NancyJuvonen, Leonard [Goldberg] and Drew and everybody, all the producersand we just felt like we wanted a very worthy adversary. Then we startedthinking about who these people could be and we started thinking aboutDemi Moore and how we were all sort of raised on her pictures.

We conceived a character that from day one we all felt like it’s got tobe Demi, it’s got to be Demi and we sent our secret weapon in DrewBarrymore on her to start talking to her and see if she could resist thetemptation of Drew to come play with us and have a great time in amovie. Something where I think Demi’s kids were prompting her a littlebit about, ‘Come on, mom, we really like this picture. You should be apart of it.’ And as was the case with Cameron on the first picture andeverybody who gets involved, no one can resist Drew.

Q: How did you decide to do this sequel as opposed to other projects youwere offered, like ‘Superman’?

McG: This was always my number one priority and I just made it clear tothe girls when we first did the first one, just sort of one of thosesacred conversations you have in the middle of the night when it’s justthe four of us sitting around a coffee table at Drew’s house in thoseintimate moments where we all sort of agreed that if it seems right forus all to come back, we made that blood oath that we were all going tocome back and honour the franchise and do what we could do to take it ashigh as we could take it. When that become the case, what, man, probablyat the end of the year, whenever we all decided let’s do it again, thenthe choices were all easy. In respect to ‘Superman’, that’s a projectthat I developed with J.J. Abrams. I was thrilled to be a part of it andsuch is the breaks in Hollywood. When they wanted to go on the picture,I was taking care of business here and they needed to move forward onthe picture. It’s all good for everybody.

Q: Where did you shoot the dam scene?

McG: The dam location is the Hansen Dam out in the valley. Then we havethe benefit of having a guy named Mark Stetson as our visual effectssupervisor who is the Academy Award Winning visual effects supervisor of’Lord of the Rings’. So, he’s able to enhance our environments and makeeverything look pretty crazy. It’s sort of an amalgam of the Hoover Damand Glen Canyon Dam, plates that we took out there and the girls hangingfrom wires 150 feet off the ground, state of the art mechanicalmechanisms and everything going into it just to make you feel thatexcitement and that rush that we’re going for.

Q: What is it like being a guy in a girls’ world?

McG: It’s insane. Here’s a studio that’s run by a woman. The producersof the film, with the exception of Leonard, are women. The stars of thefilm are women. We’ve added Demi. She’s a very strong, powerful woman.I’ve had to grow as an individual because I come from a very patriarchalfamily where my dad was the guy screaming and the whole thing, footballon Sundays and all that sort of male energy, and I really had to becomea better listener and become more compassionate. I had to grow. I had nochoice. I had to grow and it’s been fantastic but the joy is in what Ithink you see on the screen, that these girls aren’t fussy.

The joy comes from it’s not like what you would imagine, like nobodygets their hair dirty. I mean, they get blown up, they get shot at, theyget caught on fire. They break their ribs, they pick them up and that’swhy I think you root for them. It’s always that sort of Rocky Balboaparadigm where you don’t want to see Rocky just win the fight from startto finish. You want to see him getting beat up by Apollo Creed and youwant to see him just barely pick himself up by his boots and make ithappen in the final moments of the final round.

That’s the joy of the film and that’s what I think is making you soendeared to these three characters. They’re so tough and they’re sowilling to go for it, the point I’m making is when I hang out with themI feel like I’m hanging out with the guys. It’s just really cool andthat’s what the film is all about.

Q: Will the girls have any ‘Fastlane’ cameos?

McG: No, there’s no ‘Fastlane’ component. It’s just I love televisionalso and I was delighted to be a part of creating a television show, butmy focus is certainly filmmaking. I’m trying to become the bestfilmmaker I can. I see great films, like this studio’s behind’Adaptation’ and I’m buddies with Spike Jonze and I’m excited to seethat. I mean, I just want to continue to grow as a filmmaker. With thatsaid, I’m trying to spread my wings and do great things like Ron Howarddoes with Brian Grazer when they’re making great films, Academy Awardwinning pictures and they’ve also got television shows and I just likespeaking to the demographic that I understand and that’s a demographicthat watched television and goes to the movies and eats chilidogs at7-11.

Q: What cameos do you have in the film?

McG: There’s a lot of cameos and we’re going to hold onto those and keepthem secret for a while, but it’s really fun and there’s actually somereally touching cameos that I think are particularly poignantconsidering the state of affairs with the world and what’s going on witheverybody individually who’s in the picture. I think you’ll be verypleased when you see who we got to show up in the film and especiallyimpart some wisdom when it’s needed most. I think it’s going to be verysatisfying.

Q: You’re shooting with a complete script this time?

McG: Yeah. We have the benefit of a much more resolved script this timearound but I don’t fight that either. There’s a lot of creative peopleinvolved in this picture and the one thing that’s helped me more thananything in directing pictures is just doing a lot of listening. I don’tever want to be a maniacal guy that just goes up and says, ‘It’s gottabe this way, it’s gotta be that way.’ I have a lot of respect for peoplelike Drew.

It’s no accident Drew became Drew. She’s Drew because she’s fantasticand she’s smart and she takes chances and makes great choices andinspires all of us to keep reinventing ourselves and growing and doingour thing. I don’t ever want it to be that static and that planned outand that boring. It takes away from the artistry on the day to daystuff.

Q: Can you tell us a little more about the plot?

McG: There’s a guy named Rodrigo Santoro. This guy’s so hot; he’s justthe toughest most beautiful just incredible screen presence. He’s in thepicture and the idea for that is that heroes are only as good as thevillains. It’s the great sort of John McClane/Hans Gruber making eachother great. When you see great villains and it’s not just people thatthe Angels can just go through like a hot knife through butter, it’sthat much more engaging. So, here’s this guy, he’s got real physicalpresence, he’s got a great look, he actually is a surfer, he actually isa motocross rider, he’s doing all his own stunts.

He’s like the male composite of our three Angels and that’s what I want.So, I’m always looking for people that are going to take their gamehigher, because nobody likes a blow out. Everybody likes it when it goesdown to the bottom of the ninth inning and two heavyweights justslugging it out in the final round. That’s what we get out of that. Andwe’ve got John Cleese in the picture who’s a comedic genius, who we’reall thrilled to have him. He’s raising everybody’s comedic performancesto a whole nother place that we never anticipated.

And we like to have fun and that said, we’ve got Luke Wilson back andMatt LeBlanc back, so we’re diving more deeply into the personal livesof these three ladies and just taking the picture further altogether.

THE CAT IN THE HAT

The upcoming Mike Myers comedy adapted from the best-selling children’sbook. Producer Briaz Grazer recently told the press “there [was] onlyone actor I was willing to make ‘The Cat in the Hat’ with and that’sMike Myers because he is a genius as an artist and he has what the cathas, a certain playful anarchy about him!”

THE DAY AFTER TOMORROWDirector Roland Emmerich’s global warming disaster flick has changed ittitled to the much simpler “Tomorrow”. DIE HARD 4

Producer Joel Silver recently spoke to ‘CNN’ about the resurgence inrumours of a “Die Hard 4”, saying: “I think that we’ve kind of – they’verun their course, those movies.”

THE FANTASTIC FOUR

Director Chris Columbus (“Harry Potter & The Chamber Of Secrets”) ishoping to produce the big-screen adaptation of “The Fantastic Four”comic-book.

He commented on the existing screenplay by Mike Frances, saying:“…Mike Frances’s version is a good script. That version unfortunatelycost around 700 million dollars! It’s difficult to get a studio backing.We’re working on it, we’re actually doing a rewrite… what makes the’Marvel’ series so wonderful, as Stan Lee used to say in the 60’s, theseare ‘heroes with hang-ups’.”

“And they were heroes with real problems, unlike Superman and Batman atthe time. These were real characters, or at least, soap opera charactersin comic books. People really related to that. So when you got thesecomic books, you got soap operas and superhero stories.”

“The Fantastic Four have the same sort of chemistry and charactersituations that Spider-Man had. And our scripts always reflected – thefirst 30-40 pages were always about their character interaction. Wedon’t want to come off as doing exactly what Spider-Man did, so we’reworking on the script right now”.

THE GODFATHER: PART IV

‘The Herald Sun’ reports that the fourth movie featuring the infamousCorleone family could be shot in Melbourne. It looks like “an Australianindustry insider said a big Hollywood studio had already had talks aboutshooting some of the film in Melbourne and Queensland” with shootingexpected to begin late 2003.

GRIMMTerry Gilliam (“12 Monkeys”) looks set to direct “Grimm”, a projectwhich has been stuck in development for almost two years at ‘MGM’.

The film is a fictional action-adventure about folklore collectorsiblings Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. While travelling to various villagespretending to protect townsfolk from enchanted creatures, they encountera real sorceress with terrifying powers and are put to the test.

The project is described as a mix of ‘Indiana Jones’ adventure with thehumour of “Shrek”. Screenwriter Ehren Kruger (“The Ring”, “Scream 3”)wrote the script.

HARRY POTTER 3Director Chris Columbus has speculated that the child actors of “HarryPotter” will likely bow out of the franchise after the third movie. Hesaid: “If I were a betting man I’d say they’ll probably stop afterthree.” This would inevitably lead to recasting as the franchisecontinues with “The Goblet Of Fire” and the delayed fifth book “TheOrder Of The Phoenix”.

However, star Rupert Grint stated otherwise at a London Press Conferencefor the new film: “I’d like to do more. Maybe up to number five. We havesuch a good time doing them.”

Star Daniel Radcliffe also assured us that: “I’m definitely doing thethird movie, we all are doing the third. After that, who knows? It’smore or less a year to film, so it’s quite a long time before we have toencounter that decision”

Emma Watson stated that: “I don’t even know if they’re even going tomake a fourth or a fifth or whatever, but it’s a really, really goodexperience, I’ve really enjoyed them.”

Producer David Heyman recently talked about the release date for thethird “Potter” film, saying: “The third film will come out sometime in2004. We haven’t yet determined if that will be the summer or fall.Other than that, I don’t know. My focus is with the release of thesecond film, and on the preproduction and production of the third”.