The Star Online: Entertainment: Movies
The Star Online: Entertainment: Movies |
| Posted: Agent Peggy Carter is back. Marvel Studios has released a new clip from its "One-Shot" film Agent Carter, which sees Hayley Atwell reprising her role as the character, Peggy Carter. Agent Carter is set one year after the events in Captain America: The First Avenger: Peggy has just been tranferred to a new agency and her boss (Bradley Whitford) is not all that nice. In the snippet Peggy seems to have found ... something and someone. |
| Posted: The Finnish director, maker of Die Hard 2, on a quarter-century of making movies and what lies ahead. AS I'm ushered into Renny Harlin's office in Venice, Los Angeles, three blocks from where Orson Welles filmed the opening sequence of Touch Of Evil, his assistant informs me: "Oh, you'll have fun with Renny. He's been doing his homework on you." My mind fills with horrifying possibilities, recalling how Don Simpson would have a journalist's credit rating, divorce papers, and even criminal record to hand for an interview. But Finland's most successful director simply appears before me with a grin and says: "Hello, John, I very much enjoyed your –" and he quotes something I wrote a month back. "I laughed all day!" he adds. Harlin, a lean, ginger-haired man of medium height with a wind-burned, tough-guy sort of face, is currently in post-production on two projects. Having readied The Dyatlov Pass Incident for release this month, the 54-year-old is now about to edit his big-budget project Hercules 3D (starring Twilight's Kellan Lutz), due in 2014. "Hercules is an origins story. It starts with the young Hercules – how he becomes a man and comes to terms with being a demigod. I'm involved enough to be one of the writers." The Dyatlov Pass Incident, meanwhile, is about an eerie happening in the Urals in 1959, when nine experienced Russian skiers died of inexplicable causes. They got lost in a blizzard and were found dead days later: some naked or barefoot, others with crushed skulls or broken bones, one with his tongue cut out – though not a single body showed signs of trauma or struggle. The movie deploys found footage, or recreations thereof, in the style of The Blair Witch Project.  Pearly whites: Thomas Jane comes face-to-jaws with a biologically enhanced shark in Deep Blue Sea, one of Harlin's 'bounce-back' movies after the disastrous Cutthroat Island. "It's such a weird story, one of those unsolved mysteries of our time, but it's not like some 'Flying saucers spotted over the mountains' story. There are crime-scene photographs, reports, maps, drawings – if you go on the web, you can pretty much track down every available piece of information. In Soviet times, obviously, it was hard to find anything out. "Even when things happened in Russia, like plane crashes, you'd hear stories of people waiting for their relatives at the airport, and they just never showed up. No plane, no bodies. And Chernobyl – they could hardly bear to admit it. But even after all that, scientists have tried, very intelligently and seriously, to establish or guess what actually happened to these skiers. But there are only guesses, no theory that makes sense." Hercules has the biggest budget Harlin's been handed since 1995's disastrous Cutthroat Island. Ranked one of the biggest box-office flops of all time, the film was said to have stopped his career dead. But it didn't (and anyway, thanks to the perilous economic state of his backers, the romcom action film opened without advertising). Harlin's next two movies were his best: The Long Kiss Goodnight, starring Geena Davis as a schoolteacher waking up to the fact she was once a skilled assassin; and Deep Blue Sea, his hit about brain-boosted sharks. Harlin has made a movie every 18 months or two years ever since – oddities such as Exorcist: The Beginning, straight-to-DVD thrillers like Cleaner, and on-the-quiet mini-hits like The Covenant. Intriguingly, his later-period work echoes much of his early-career output, when he slalomed from exploitation flicks such as A Nightmare On Elm Street 4: The Dream Master, to the Andrew Dice Clay action comedy The Adventures Of Ford Fairlane, before landing the second Die Hard movie in 1990. Just give the man a movie, it seems, and he'll make it one way or another, large, middling or small. I apologise for my scant knowledge of Harlin's homeland, but am able to mention Aki Kaurismaki, Finland's dourest, driest and most deadpan screenwriter and director. "Aki! Yes, we know each other well. We were pretty much of the same generation of film students. One morning my doorbell rings at 5am and there's Aki. 'We're shooting and our car broke down,' he says. 'We need yours.' I have this 1963 Volvo. 'That's perfect!' he says. 'We'll bring it back later.' For the scene, the car has to brake really hard about 20 times. My brakes were shot by the end of the day. Aki killed my poor old Volvo! That's Aki." Kaurismaki, with his minimalist black comedies, was able to function in the restrictive Finnish government film-financing infrastructure of the late 1970s. Harlin not so much. "Because everything was government-financed, it all had to be socially conscious with serious issues: unemployment, divorce, alcoholism – really heavy. And Finnish people just weren't going to see Finnish movies. Aki could break into that – his sensibility could just about be fitted into the system, but I had to break away. I needed foreign financing." The title of Harlin's first movie hinted at the rebirth to come: 1988's Born American was about three Finns who cross into what was then still Soviet Russia and suffer various tribulations of the blood-soaked variety. It was instantly banned in Finland for "anti-Soviet sentiment", allegedly at the behest of the Soviet ambassador to Finland. "It was the first film banned for political reasons in Finland since the 1930s, and it was news everywhere. I remember the LA Times headline: 'Born in Finland. Banned in Finland.' It was a shock. We thought, 'Wait, isn't Finland an independent country – or is it still a part of Russia?' They made an enormous mistake, but we used it to our advantage in publicity." And so he had his Hollywood calling-card. Within five years of arriving, he was directing Bruce Willis in Die Hard 2 and Sylvester Stallone in Cliffhanger, making money hand over fist for his studios. In the years since, he worked on a biopic about Baron Carl Mannerheim, Finland's most revered 20th-century leader, a contradictory, hedonistic enigma, and perhaps Finland's Churchill, who spent decades in the pre-revolutionary Imperial Russian army before leading Finnish forces against the Soviets in 1919-21, and then again in the second world war, before routing remaining Nazis in Lapland. "I worked on it for more than 10 years," says Harlin. "We even started it twice – once in Lithuania, once in Hungary. We had over 1,000 costumes made, all props and sets designed and built, all casting done, award-winning makeup designers for the lifelong ageing." Despite all this, the film never came to fruition, something that clearly still saddens him. "My parents were both in the war," he says wistfully. "Every Finnish home had Mannerheim's picture on the wall." He displaced some of his energy into 2011's 5 Days Of August, filmed in Georgia, about the five-day Russian incursion into South Ossetia in 2007. This, for Harlin, was another small and vulnerable place like Finland, hedged in by huge neighbouring empires. "I felt like this Georgia situation offered me a ventilation, a pressure valve from the Mannerheim experience. And I poured all those emotions into it instead." He regrets now not being more familiar with all sides of the conflict, but he wouldn't trade anything for the days he got to boss the Georgian army around. "It was incredible commanding 80 tanks, with thousands of troops surging across the landscape, and all those planes and helicopters. I felt like Sam Peckinpah making Cross Of Iron." I wonder which he prefers: shooting or editing. "I love editing, but I'm happiest on the set with the crew, the cast, the extras, being the commander. Not in a pretentious, Napoleonic way, but because I was always like that since I was a kid – in the sandbox going, 'OK, you guys go there, you guys do that.' And it's a role I love still." – Guardian News & Media |
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