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Disorder: Just How Unusual Is It For A Thriller To Be Directed By A Woman? (Sponsored Post)

18th March 2016 By Tim Isaac

disorder-slideThe recent furore over race at the Academy Awards helped highlight the fact that film often has an issue with diversity in many forms, not least the lack of female directors. Even those women who have succeeded in the movie industry have tended to be shoehorned into particular categories, such as making romantic comedies and family movies, and then dumped the moment they had a single failure. For example, of the top fifty highest grossing movies ever at the box office, only one had a female director – Jennifer Lee’s Frozen – and even she had a male co-director (Chris Buck).

It’s particularly unusual for women to direct thrillers, making Alice Winocour’s Disorder a rather unusual movie. The film, which is released in UK cinemas on March 25th via Soda Pictures, stars Matthias Schoenaerts as Vincent, a soldier suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder who, having been placed on indefinite leave owing to his diagnosis, is forced to take work as a private security contractor guarding a lavish party at a luxurious French villa. Staying on alone after the bash to guard the beautiful Maryland estate as well as Jesse (Diane Kruger), the wife of its shady owner, and her young son Ali, Vincent becomes more and more convinced that the pair and the estate are the targets for unspecified, highly dangerous enemies.

The well-received film was screened at Cannes as part of the Un Certain Regard section of the festival. It was one of the few movies directed by a woman at the festival, and the only thriller. Women really do have an uphill struggle in the film industry, as even successes – such as Kathryn Bigelow winning the Best Picture Oscar for The Hurt Locker and box office hits like Catherine Hardwicke’s Twilight and Sam Taylor-Johnson’s Fifty Shades Of Grey – seem to have little impact on those in charge of the purse strings.

It’s a situation where men with little or no feature film experience can be given massive budget movies – for example Colin Trevorrow had only made the micro-budget Safety Not Guaranteed before Jurassic World, while the recent Deadpool marked Tim Miller’s feature-film debut. Female directors meanwhile tend to have to work much harder before anyone will take a chance on them with a larger budget film, and then with every film it almost feels like the system is waiting for them to fail so that can say they were right about female directors being risky to hire. After all, while Kathryn Bigelow made massive strides into almost exclusively male-directed genres with films like Near Dark, Blue Steel, Point Break and Strange Days, it only took a single failure – K-19 The Widomaker – to see her cast into the wilderness. Even The Hurt Locker – made after a gap of six years where she couldn’t get any films financed – had to be made independently as no one would take a chance on her, despite her earlier success working within the mainstream system.

All this means that for someone such as Alice Winocour to make a movie such as Disorder is a real achievement. It also shows a desire not to be pigeonholed. Following the praise received for her 2012 debut, Augustine, it would probably have been easier for her to stay with the world of period drama, or to get funding for a traditionally ‘female’ focused film. Instead she wrote Disorder and in doing so helped prove why female voices should be heard more in all genres. Many thrillers have a tendency to treat female characters as a cipher – purely there to look pretty and be in peril. However, while Disorder has a male character at its centre, Diane Kruger is given a fully fleshed character in her own right, adding a dimension to the film that is often lacking.

Even so, the movie joins a sadly short list of female-directed thrillers. They do exist, such as Mary Harron’s American Psycho and Mimi Leder’s The Peacemaker, but they are incredibly rare.

To put into context how difficult it can be for female directors, a recent report revealed that of the top 250 films of 2015, only seven percent were directed by women. That wasn’t because the female-directed movies were worse – it was because so few of them were made, particularly within the mainstream system (of the top 700 movies, 13% were directed by women, suggesting those women who are able to make films are largely doing so in the truly independent and international arenas). Most disturbingly, 7% was actually fewer female-directed movies than a similar report done 18 years before, suggesting the situation for female directors is actually getting worse.

Disorder is evidence of what a ridiculous situation that is, and we can only hope that it is at the vanguard of female directors not being shoehorned into particular genres, and being given more opportunities to make a full breadth of different types of films. In fact, let’s hope they get to make more movies full stop. The film industry still has massive amounts of work to do until there is real parity – not just for female directors, but also for actresses, female writers and in most other jobs too – but perhaps filmmakers like Alice Winocour can point the way.

Disorder-Quad

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EE BAFTAs Red Carpet Arrivals Gallery – From Matt Damon to Steven Spielberg & more

15th February 2016 By Tim Isaac

DSCN1218-slideIt was a very cold night in London, but we were lucky enough to be on the red carpet at this year’s BAFTAs to catch the arrivals. It was certainly a starry line-up, with everyone from Rebel Wilson and Dakota Johnson, to John Boyega and Saoirse Ronan.

Oh and some people called Michael Fassbender, Steven Spielberg, Kate Winslet, Leonardo DiCaprio, Bryan Cranston, Eddie Redmayne and Benicio Del Toro showed up too. But nobody has ever heard of them.

As we were stood just before the main photography area, we managed to get a few more candid snaps of the stars than usual, often when they were getting ready to go in front of the lens of around a hundred professional press photographers. It’s an oddly interesting place to stand, as you certainly learn who’s considered important and who isn’t, with the big stars queue jumping and making the lesser celebs wait (it’s not their fault, they just get led there).

Take a look at the gallery below for the unexpected delights of Matt Damon and Eddie Izzard being in the same photo, Mark Ruffalo looking like he’s being a bit pervy (although I promise he wasn’t), and Bryan Cranston demonstrating the need for gloves that still allow you to work your phone. [Read more…]

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Sarah Wayne Callies Talks Into The Storm – The actress steps away from the tornadoes to chat about the film

15th December 2014 By Tim Isaac


Sarah Wayne Callies got an awful lot of fans Lori in The Walking Dead, adding to those she’d already gained from her time on Prison. However this year rather than the undead or jail conspiracies, she’s been dealing with the forces of nature in Into The Storm.

She stars in the film alongside Richard Armitage, as two of the people dealing with a serious of enormous, powerful and incredibly destructive tornadoes than hit the small town of Silverton. The film is out on DVD & Blu-ray now, so it’s a good chance to catch up with Callies and her thoughts on the film.

What was the draw for you to be a part of Into the Storm?
I thought it’d be fun to do a big, crazy special effects movie. I’ve never done anything like that before. And then I read it and what really held my attention was the fact that it’s this huge spectacle of a movie, but, at the same time, it’s also a story about how people who are strangers can become almost family in the course of a single day when that day threatens all their lives and is chaotic and overwhelming. I just think there’s something really moving about that. It’s the story of strangers who become family in the course of 24 hours.

The catalyst to that, obviously, is a tornado and it’s amazing and cool to see all that thrashing around. But I think from a human perspective, it’s really simple and really moving. It’s interesting. We never know whether we’re heroes or cowards until the sirens go off and the storm is coming. You learn so much about yourself in those moments that you can’t know otherwise. Movies like this are fascinating because inevitably we end up casting ourselves in them and thinking, ‘Well, I hope I would do this and I think I would do that.’

Storytelling is an old thing that humans have done for as long as we’ve been around. We tell each other stories to try and figure out who we are. This is a summer movie but it’s still a movie that tells us something about who we are and who we might be.

You play Allison Stone, who’s a climatologist and meteorologist and has joined the storm-chasing team for the first time. What can you tell us about her?
Allison is somebody who’s studied weather events in depth and with a great deal of passion and who has incredibly strong opinions about the need for certain kinds of climate work, to demonstrate certain things about climate change. In a way, she’s sort of a combination between an academic and ideologue, and all of a sudden these storms leap out of her textbook and into her face.

So, it’s the story of a woman who’s had a lot of ideas and a lot of theories about weather and about the politics of weather who all of a sudden finds herself very much immersed in the practicalities of weather, which are two very different things. She’s getting her hands dirty for the first time and it’s very, very dirty.

I understand you did quite a bit of research for the role?
I did. I mean, I’m the daughter of academics. Research is just part of my de facto approach to things. So I got a meteorology textbook and thought I would just read it and try and make sense of it. But about fifteen pages in, I discovered that I quite simply did not have the physics to wrap my head around what was going on.

So I reached out to a professor of meteorology at the University of Michigan, which is in Ann Arbor, very close to where we shot in Detroit. I just ‘cold called’ him. He was the emeritus professor or chair of the department, and turned out to be a gentleman, I believe, in his 80’s. So, when I called, I sounded like a little like valley girl, ‘Hello, I’m an actor and I have some questions about weather. It’s a new movie.’ And, bless his heart, we actually met for lunch while I was filming and he was so patient, answered all kinds of questions for me and drew me all kinds of pictures that helped break down the science for somebody who has never been particularly strong in that suit. He was a doll.

And then, of course, I would take it to Steve. I’d say, ‘Steve, okay, you know how they say vorticity and none of us knows what that means?’ And we’d draw pictures and get all excited. Steve’s a big geek like I am, and we thought it was super cool to be able to be really specific about what all this stuff means and to be able to throw that language around in a way that Allison could.

Was he a fan of The Walking Dead?
No. I mean, granted, I have met people who are fans of the show in their 80’s but he did tell me that he told his son and his son was excited about it. And he looked me dead in the eye and he said, ‘For the life of me I don’t know why.’ [Laughs] And I thought, ‘Oh, that’s fantastic! I’ve never been to your classes before. You’ve never seen my work. We’re strangers and we’re collaborating for the moment.’

I will say that I think there’s a decent chance he’ll see the movie and as we were shooting it, one of my only goals was to make sure that he wouldn’t see the movie and think, like, ‘I took my time with this woman and she didn’t take it in and was a bad student.’ I didn’t want him to flunk me. [Laughs]

Can you talk about working with Richard Armitage, who plays Gary, the high school vice principal, and the bond that forms between them?
Richard was a doll. ‘Waiting For Richard’ was the title of this movie for a moment because I showed up in Detroit, had dinner with [director] Steve Quale and he said, ‘So, do you have any questions?’ I said, ‘Yeah, who’s playing Gary and who’s playing Pete?’ Because they still hadn’t cast them. And he said, ‘You’re going to be really excited but we’re still pursuing and we don’t want to jinx anything by saying.’

So, when I found it was Richard, I immediately wrote to Andy Lincoln [Callies’ former co-star in The Walking Dead] because my assumption is that all British actors know each other. And so far, I haven’t been wrong. [Laughs] Richard and Andy had done Strike Back together, and Andy was thrilled. I’m on this funny streak. I had, I think, five consecutive English leading men. So, when I called Andy about Richard, he said, ‘Oh, you’re going to love him. He’s a wonderful guy. He’s super smart. He’s really kind and he makes the set a great place to be.’ And then, unbeknownst to me, Richard did the same thing and called him. [Laughs] So, we actually came together having had a good friend vouch for each other, which was helpful.

Then, maybe a week later, Richard and I both were at San Diego Comic-Con. He was there with The Hobbit movie gang and I was with The Walking Dead gang and they were coming in right after us at a press event. But we were going to have to leave before they arrived. So I literally scribbled a note on a piece of paper and just said, ‘I heard from Steve that you’re going to be playing Gary. Can’t wait to meet you.’ And left a little lipstick mark on a piece of paper and handed it to a journalist. I said, ‘Would you please give this to Richard Armitage?’ She’s like, ‘Are you kidding me?’ I said, ‘No, I’m not.’ [Laughs] So, we were passing notes back and forth before we met.

And I really like what he did with Gary. The point of Gary, the point of all of these people, is that they’re not heroes. For all of the amazing, gorgeous films that are coming out right now with superheroes, this is just a movie about two people who are both teachers—I’m a professor and he’s an assistant principal—and we’re both parents and end up in a situation where we’re the ones who’ve got to advocate for and try to save as many students as we can, and also try and find our way back to our own children. And that’s a pretty simple story.

And Richard is so good looking. He’s so strong and he’s got such an incredible presence that it would’ve been easy for him I think to play Gary like a sort of Cary Grant-style hero. That wouldn’t have been the story but it would’ve been easy for him to do and everybody would’ve loved him for it. But he didn’t do that. He just put his ego aside and decided to play him as a regular guy and a man who was broken by the loss of his wife and having a hard time reaching his children. And I really admire what he did with that role because I think he did it beautifully.

Can you also talk about working with Matt Walsh, who plays Pete, the leader of the storm-chasing team?
Yeah, Matty was fantastic. I think we got really lucky with Matt because he doesn’t work from a place of ego. Matt works from a place of wanting to tell the story, and I thought he gave Pete a real beating heart. He was somebody who genuinely believed in a project and had put his whole heart and soul into it, just as Allison had, but we have completely different reasons for what we’re doing.

Pete is somebody who wants to show people something they’ve never seen before, and it’s also the only way he’s going to pay his bills. But he is a true believer and what’s kind of cool is that he and Allison are both passionate and intense and have differences, but they’re the differences that people have who deeply believe in what they’re doing. He’s not a mercenary which I think is pretty cool.

And having Matt Walsh on a set is just a little fun. He’s somebody who can look at you from across the field and make you crack up and you don’t even really know why. Matt just made everybody laugh and he was an absolute doll. We got really lucky; we had a really, really nice cast of people.

What was it like working with director Steven Quale, and how did he communicate his vision to you while bringing out so much naturalism in the characters?
Working with Steve is like entering the laboratory of a mad scientist. I mean, no matter who you are, he’s smarter than you, but he doesn’t make a point of it. [Laughs] It’s a little bit like sitting down and playing chess with Bobby Fischer. You’re hanging out with somebody who sees so many moves ahead of you that the best thing you can do is go along for the ride and do your work.

So, there were times where he was sort of bouncing around from bubbling beaker to bubbling beaker because it’s an incredibly technical movie. And I think Steve did a wonderful job of not making us feel like this is a movie about a tornado and you’re a bunch of meat puppets.

The truth of the matter is that the tornado is the star of the movie, but I think we’re also going to give people something very moving and very human. There are going to be a lot of people who buy the ticket because they want to see a big tornado and they’re going to get their money’s worth. It’s a big tornado, and it’s amazing. But Steve did a great job of not making our work as actors secondary to any of that.

The very first conversation he and I had was about, ‘How do we make this the most grounded human story that we possibly can?’ I found him really collaborative to work with. He’d listen to what you had to say and go, ‘Ok, let’s craft this thing together.’ There would be moments where I’d be worried about how something would work, and he would explain technically how he was going to deal with it. And, I’ll be honest, I never really understood the explanation. But I thought, ‘Well, he’s got an explanation so I’ll just trust him.’ And at the end of the day that trust I think paid off.

What was it like for you to work on such a stunt-heavy film? Did you do those stunts for real?
Oh, yeah. That was a part of the draw of the film for me, because I get to fly around and do wire work and stuff like that. I’d never had much of an experience doing it before on sets. I studied aerial arts for three years when I was in grad school and loved it. And I’ve always wanted to do a job where I could bring some of that work in.

So, we got to that scene outside the bank on the tank and our stunt coordinator, he’s a high flyer. He’s the guy who made his living jumping off of sixty-story buildings without any kind of a harness and sort of aiming for a mattress. He was just incredible. He’s fearless and has a real sense of what’s possible.

So, I showed up on the first day and they harnessed me up onto the wire and an hour later, we were just playing like children. He said, ‘Hey, I’m going to let you do all of this.’ I said, ‘Thank you. I want to do all of this.’ The one thing they wouldn’t let me do is the fall just because insurance companies at a certain point stand up and say, ‘You can’t drop our female lead 20 feet onto concrete. We’re not going let you do it.’ I said, ‘Okay, fine.’

So, I got to do virtually all of it and it was amazing. Part of the thing that’s great about that kind of work is there’s just no acting involved. Somebody puts you on a wire and yanks you backwards, there’s a hundred-mile-an-hour fan and a rain tower in your face, you don’t have to act scared. [Laughs] You’re right there. You’re scared. It’s pure adrenaline. And it was fun. It was really, really fun. The stunt coordinator and I talked about it afterwards. I was like, ‘Dude, let’s do a movie like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon where we just fly through the whole thing.’ [Laughs] I absolutely loved it.

How about the special effects? I understand that the rain and the wind machines were there for about half the shoot?
Yeah. I read scripts differently now, which is to say I now look at a script and say, ‘Wait. I’m wet for how long? There’s how much rain in this thing?’ I just read the script and thought it was a great story and it wasn’t until we were actually in prep and I was breaking it down that I thought, ‘Wait a minute. I’m going to be soaked to the skin for 45 days out of this filming.’

What was great, and I know that this was intentional on Steve’s part, was they had as many practical effects as they could. So, we had hundred-mile-an-hour fans, which you can’t really fathom. The first time they turned it on in front of me in a scene it blew me 20 feet off my mark. You could literally lean your full body weight into it and it would hold you up. And then they’d throw dirt and leaves into it so there’d be debris flying around. Then they turned the rain towers on and it certainly wasn’t comfortable, but, again, it saved us the indignity of trying to act like you’re in a tornado. You’re just there.

I think green screen movies can be difficult because if you’ve got seven actors who are all imagining something different, it can start to become a little incoherent. We had a huge number of practical effects, and because Steve does come from such a technical background, he was able to unify our visions whenever we had to do imaginative work. He’d sit us down before we would start filming and show us all the mockups of the effects so that we would know what we’d be seeing.

In this film, cameras are positioned everywhere, and there is a lot of handheld camerawork. What was that like for you as an actor, and did having so many cameras around affect your performance?
In a way, what was great about it was that Richard and I both come from theater. I left this movie and went right into a play and Richard’s doing a play right now. There’s something great about being on stage, which is that it keeps you very honest because whether or not you’re talking, people are looking at you. If you’re not acting all the way down to your feet, people are going to see that your body is lying and they’re not going to buy it.

So, in a way, doing this movie was like doing a play because we had GoPro Cameras and an actor would have a camera over their shoulder and half the time it would be a tactical camera, so you never knew when you were being filmed. I don’t know how our cinematographer lit the film because it’s a virtually impossible task but, thankfully, it’s not a movie in which any of us had to look particularly good. [Laughs] We just had to look like people.

But the effect of having so many cameras around kept you very honest as an actor because you can’t say, ‘Well, I’m going to sit out this take.’ Everybody is on all the time, which I think is a wonderful way to work. And because it’s somewhat of a ‘found footage’ movie, you can’t do a traditional master, tighter close-up kind of shot because those angles might not exist in the ‘real’ world of the storytelling. So, a lot of times a scene will play as a single wide shot where you see five characters.

There’s a scene where we go to get the two kids who’ve been trapped—you’ll have to see the movie to know if we succeed—but you see the reactions of the three of us. And instead of cutting to the kids and cutting to the dad and cutting to the kids and cutting to me, it plays almost the way it would on stage. It’s very real and very raw. And I think the rawness of the way the footage is captured also helps reflect the rawness of the emotions that are involved. It’s not so much ‘shaky cam’ that you need to take a Dramamine before you go into the theater. But the camera itself is a character because the camera’s being held by the characters.

And I’ve got to give a shout-out to the camera team because, God bless them, they were with us in all of the wind, all of the rain, wrapped in plastic, fighting with the Alexa [camera] to make her do their bidding. It was no fun for them and they really did beautiful, beautiful work.

Looking back at the experience, do you have an experience that was particularly memorable for you?
[Laughs] Yeah. It’s not particularly serious but Richard and I were doing a scene in the weather van where I’m driving and we’re looking for his son. And we were both indoors but soaked to the skin. Then I took a deep breath and said, ‘Does it smell like a barn in here?’

He had on a cheap wool suit because his character would wear a cheap wool suit, and he insisted on that to the costume designer, ‘Get me something this character could afford.’ So, he had a cheap, wool suit and when it got wet, he smelled like a wet sheep. And they can hear this conversation over the earphones. And the makeup artist, who’s a marvelous woman who somehow kept makeup on our faces with a hundred-mile-an-hour fan right on us, came in and handed me a tube of Chap Stick that was bacon-flavored and said, ‘Put this on,’ and closed the door.

So, I put on the bacon-flavored Chap Stick. They closed the door and I was sitting there with my pig-smelling lips. Richard was here with his sheep-smelling suit and I turned to him and said, ‘Richard, you have no idea how many women would be thrilled for the opportunity to be locked in a very small space with you. And the only thing I can think is that you smell like a barn.’ We both started laughing. And for the rest of the day, every time they cut, he would just turn to me and go, ‘Baaah!’ It was just a lovely moment of two people surviving being wet and freezing cold.

What do you hope audiences will come away with after having experienced this movie?
I think maybe it’s possible that this is a movie about the fact that a parent’s love for their children is stronger than even the most violent storm imaginable. I think that’s pretty cool. And hopefully people will come out of this movie with a stronger sense of what we’re capable of as regular old people who try and protect each other, which can be pretty amazing.

But, look, if they just want to go see some really cool special effects and ignore those of us with arms and legs running around, that’s okay too. If you just want to sit in the dark for a couple of hours and let us tell you a pretty cool story about a really rough day, I’m okay with that too.

I don’t think it’s for me to tell people what they might get out of it. I just know I saw it and I knew it was coming and I had a really, really, really great time.

INTO THE STORM IS AVAILABLE ON BLU-RAY AND DVD ON 15TH DECEMBER 2014.

 

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Sponsored Post: Bombay Sapphire Launches Imagination Series: Film Competition – Adrien Brody amongst the judges of innovative short film comp

2nd July 2013 By Tim Isaac

It’s always good to hear about people helping the world of short film, as a lot of excellent work is done in that area, but there’s very little funding and support. Bombay Sapphire has stepped up though and launched its second Bombay Sapphire Imagination Series: Film competition over at www.imaginationseries.com.

The Bombay Sapphire Imagination Series: Film competition, in association with the Tribeca Film Festival®, is based around an interesting idea. Academy Award winning screenwriter Geoffrey Fletcher (Precious) has come up with a very short script, and then filmmakers are tasked with coming up with an idea for a film using that dialogue.

The very simple script sees two characters in a situation one of them thinks they should get out of. However there’s very few stage directions and so the filmmaker gets to decide what happened, the location, what the characters are and pretty much everything else. You can see last year’s disparate and rather clever winning films below.

The competition will close on 4 August 2013, after which Adrien Brody, Geoffrey Fletcher and a panel of experts from the Tribeca Film Festival will shortlist the four most imaginative ideas to go into production. The panel will shortlist a further five ideas to go forward to a public vote, the winner of which will also be filmed.

All five films will then premiere at Tribeca in April 2014.

Adrien Brody comments, “I was a wild, mischievous kid and I had tremendous imagination. Any experience I had, I’d try to re-enact it. I always had an actor within me and I feel extremely passionate to be able to work with Bombay Sapphire on this competition. Imagination really can take you anywhere and is so subjective, so I eagerly anticipate people’s interpretation of Geoffrey’s script and look forward to embarking on this incredible journey with them.”

For more details on the competition, script and how to enter visit: www.imaginationseries.com.

The Imagination Series script entry deadline has been extended for two more weeks and the new deadline is 18th August 2013 11.59pm (GMT).

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Luis Tosar Interview – Chatting with the star of Sleep Tight

28th February 2013 By Tim Isaac


If you want someone who can be as sympathetic as he is scary, Spanish actor Luis Tosar is a good choice. He’s been excellent in the likes of Cell 211 and Even The Rain, and he returns to UK cinemas this Friday (March 1st) in Sleep Tight – from the director of [REC] – in which he plays a lonely night porter who gets up to come rather creepy activities at night. You can read our review here.

We caught up with Luis a few months ago, to chat about the film.

What attracted you to the film?
I loved the evil side of the character I play and the fact that he did not have any empathy and yet there was a great sense of humour about him. When I met up with the director we immediately clicked and I really felt that we were on the same wavelength for what we wanted the film to be, so I signed up straight away. We both believed that my character was perfect on the script and I didn’t want to change him in any way, I worked on small nuances when it felt right on set but on the whole, the script and the remarkably well-written character was why I signed up for Sleep Tight.

Cesar is a despicable character yet oddly endearing? How did you achieve this? Was this in the script or your doing?
I had no reference for where to start in terms of Cesar, as I’d never experienced anyone like him before. He is such an unusual character because he just doesn’t want anyone to be happy, he feeds off misery and when he encounters someone who is profoundly positive, he goes out of his way to make sure that stops. So instead I pictured myself in that dark mindset, and how I’d feel, act and behave and what I’d do to people who I didn’t understand. There’s a playful side to him, and I was incredibly interested in his sadistic game; I was determined to make the viewer feel like a victim and surprise them when they realise that he was not who they thought he was.

There have been some really great thrillers from the Spanish film industry recently, why do you think this is?
It could be because Filmax is based in Spain, they have their headquarters in Catalonia, and we have fantastic film factories now there as well, which I think together gives us the capabilities now to make internationally appealing films. We also have the Sitges film festival, which is also based in Catalonia, and I believe contributes hugely to creating a dedicated fan base of Spanish horror and fantasy film fans. The reception to Sleep Tight was great there.

Do you think that Sleep Tight will get a Hollywood remake?
Funnily enough, at the same time that they were making this film, they were talks of another film coming out with Hilary Swank that had a similar theme but it turned out they were not the same. But no, I’ve not heard any talk of remakes or an indication that anyone is going to make it.

What’s next for you?
My next film is called Operation E ad it’s a political drama based on the arms conflict in Columbia.

Thank you Luis.

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Top Road Movies – Get behind the wheel and go for a spin!

22nd February 2013 By Tim Isaac


Not many things are better for cleansing the soul than leaving everything behind and going travelling. In the case of the road movie genre, travelling is the perfect occasion for characters to break free from the mundane aspects of their lives – embarking in a once in a lifetime adventure, gathering their thoughts, and learning about themselves.

In order to escape their current lives in one way or another, characters leave their homes to set out on a combination of spiritual journeys, quests, chases and crime sprees. The common theme in each film is that each of the characters are living for the moment and on the road anything is possible, here are our top 10 favourites:

Top 10 films (in no particular order):


On The Road (2012)

Director: Walter Salle
The story of a generation, On The Road tells the story of aspiring young New York writer Sal Paradise as he meets and begins an intense friendship with seductive ex-con Dean Moriarty. Determined not to get trapped in a narrow mundane life, the two friends hit the road alongside Moriarty’s jail bait wife Marylou. Thirsting for freedom and set to a backdrop of drugs, sex, jazz and hedonistic 1940’s America, the friends soon discover the world, others and themselves in a life defining trip.



Easy Rider (1969)

Director: Dennis Hooper
Generation-defining, this film explores the societal landscape, issues, and tensions in the United States during the 1960s, such as the rise and fall of the hippie movement, drug use, and communal lifestyle. Easy Rider is famous for its use of real drugs in its portrayal of marijuana and other substances.



Bonnie and Clyde (1967)

Director: Arthur Penn
Infamous outlaws; Bonnie and Clyde were bank robbers who traveled the Central United States with their gang during the Great Depression. Arthur Penn released this film in the 1960s to reflect the counterculture revolution that was taking place at the time in a statement of declaration for the youngsters of the civil rights and Vietnam era.



True Romance (1993)

Director: Tony Scott
The road movie at its most self-consciously cool, as lead characters Clarence and his hooker wife Alabama storm across America after stealing cocaine from Alabama’s pimp – a blizzard of sex, drugs and kung fu movie references.



The Motorcycle Diaries (2004)

Director: Walter Salles
Gael García Bernal plays the young Che Guevara, whose eyes are opened to the injustice of the world while travelling across South America on a knackered bike known, ironically, as The Mighty One.



Thelma and Louise (1991)

Director: Ridley Scott
‘Feminists on lam’, Thelma and Louis embark on a two day vacation to the mountains that quickly turns into much more. After shooting dead a rapist the women take off in a 66 thunderbird travelling from Oklahoma to Mexico picking up a thief who has broken his parole along the way with disastrous consequences.



Smokey and the Bandit (1977)

Director: Hal Neeham
Bandit and Basset hound Fred bamboozle “Smokey” the Sheriff Buford T. Justice to distract the law while Bandit’s pal delivers an illegal booze-filled truck cross-state.



Little Miss Sunshine (2006)

Director: Jonathan Dayton, Valerie Faris
Whimsical Oscar-winning indie about a family who drop everything to drive daughter Abigail Breslin to a beauty pageant carrying their dead grandfather on the latter stage of their journey.



Dumb and Dumber (1994)

Director: Bobby & Peter Farrelly
The Farrelly brothers start as they mean to go on sending idiots Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels on a quest to return a lost briefcase. Star of the show, though, is their mode of transport, the sheepdog-inspired Mutt Cutts van.



Road Trip (2002)

Director: Todd Phillips
This hilarious comedy features four college friends who take off on an 1800 mile road trip to retrieve an illicit tape mistakenly mailed to a girl friend with hilarious consequences

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