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Tuesday 25 August 2015
If
this were a movie, Hamid Ali Khan aka Ajit aka Loin (lion) would have
probably asked Mona darling to get him his gun to take care of a man who
dared to mess with his cub. Ajit and his son Shehzad Khan, who is best known for his role as Bhalla in Andaz Apna Apna. File pics
In real life, and in the absence of Bollywood’s biggest villain,
however, it was left to the Bandra police to deal with the carpenter,
who allegedly made nearly 100 threatening calls a day to Ajit’s son,
Shehzad Khan (48) — best known for his role as Bhalla in Andaz Apna Apna
— and his wife, Shabnam, beginning August 10. Ten days and nearly a
thousand calls later, the carpenter was finally arrested on August 20. Beginnings Early in August, Imtiaz Ansari (35)
was working as a carpenter at the house of one of the Khans’ neighbours
in Monalisa building in Bandra’s Mount Mary’s area, and Shabnam hired
him to repair a sofa in their living room. According to Shehzad’s
complaint with the Bandra police, no amount had been decided beforehand. Also Read: Caller who threatened Pooja Bhatt nabbed
After working for a week, Ansari asked them for Rs 2,500, which he
was given. Over the course of the next two days, he asked for more money
— R1,000 at a time — claiming that he needed to buy material for the
repair. By August 10, he had taken Rs 7,500 in all from the couple.
Sensing that they were being duped, the Khans asked Ansari to
discontinue work on the sofa and said they would get it repaired by
someone else. Calls begin An outraged Ansari then allegedly
began to make as many as 100 threatening calls a day to Shehzad and
Shabnam, going as far as threatening to kill them if he was not given
more money, which he claimed he was owed. He gave them an account number
and asked them to deposit the money there.
Fed up, Shehzad approached the Bandra police station on August 12 and
filed a complaint, but the calls did not cease. “The accused would
harass Shehzad and his wife and had even threatened them to kill them.
Ansari would ask them to put the money in his account and claimed he
would take revenge if this was not done,” said an official from the
Bandra police, who then began tracing the calls. Bravado The officer added, “Ansari called from
different PCO’s, making it difficult to track his movements. But all the
calls were made from the Kurla Kamani area. Even we tried to convince
him on the phone to stop harassing the family, but he dared us to arrest
him.”
In a bid to settle the dispute, Shehzad deposited R1,000 in Ansari’s
account on August 17, but the calls still continued. The police then
visited the bank in which Ansari had asked for the money to be
deposited. They traced Ansari’s address with the help of bank officials
and arrested him on August 20. Repentance After the arrest, Ansari changed his
tune and told the police he felt sorry for the act. He said he had made
all the calls in a fit of anger. He was booked under Sections 504
(Intentional insult with intent to provoke breach of the peace) and 506
(2) (Criminal intimidation) of the Indian Penal Code. He was produced in
Bandra court and released on bail.
When mid-day contacted Shehzad, he refused to comment and said all
the details were available with the police station. Deputy Commissioner
of police (Zone IZ) Satyanarayan Chaudhary said, “We deployed two teams
and arrested the accused. We are taking adequate preventive action to
ensure that the family is not harassed further.”
- See more at:
http://www.mid-day.com/articles/mumbai-carpenter-makes-threatening-calls-to-bollywood-villain-ajits-son/16481154#sthash.00MEECbq.dpuf
16 Things that prove watching Bollywood movies makes you a better person
While some may ridicule Bollywood movies for being too dramatic or extremely nonsensical, others may
find them too dumb to waste their precious time over. But for all those Bollywood haters, here's the ultimate answer of a
true filmy person that proves, watching Bollywood movies does more good than harm. In fact, it actually holds the power
to make you a much much better person.
1. When we learnt the true meaning of love from Kuch Kuch Hota Hai that taught us 'Pyaar Dosti
Hai'.
2. Then Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani taught us to follow our dreams because you'll get the girl by goofing
around and dancing anyway.
3. When DDLJ taught you how to decipher symbols - speaking bell hung at Kajol's door or the power of
telepathy...
4. The time when Hum Saath Saath Hain made us realize the importance of family. In fact, the sanskar we get
is directly proportional to the number of Alok Nath movies we watch.
5. Or when Hum Aapke Hain Kaun showed us how a dog is really a man's best friend and taught us to respect
animals.
6. When Karan Arjun came back from the dead just because their mother had faith, we learnt the importance
of keeping hope.
7. When Dil Toh Pagal Hai taught us to have the courage to shake leg against all odds of a broken leg or a
broken heart, if there's rain.
8. When Andaz Apna Apna taught us the important lesson of sharing in friendship when the do dost
sipped tea from ek pyala.
9. When Border filled us with patriotism as Suniel Shetty left his newly wed wife to go fight the battle or
when Sunny Deol and Akshaye Khanna fought for the country.
10. When Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikander, apart from raising Pooja Bedi's skirt, also raised the competitive spirit
in us.
11. When Salman Khan proved in Pyar Kiya Toh Darna Kya that being shirtless is cool or that even if you're
a shmuck chasing chicken or getting beaten by the girl's bro, you can still win your love if you don't
fear.
12. When Dil Chahta Hai told us that your friends are forever even if you get slapped by them or move to
Australia.
13. When Mujhse Shaadi Karogi taught us how to manage our anger and come out a winner coming over all
obstacles.
14. How Pardes made us realize that despite the NRI being cute as hell, he/ she can really be a douche bag
and that pardes will be pardes and desh will always be home.
15. When Queen taught us, that 'single as f**k' can mean a good thing too.
16. And when Vicky Donor taught us that charity is not that hard to do. In fact, it can be fun too!
From playing the role of a ruthless villain in Parinda (1990) to
essaying the part of an eccentric gangster in Welcome (2007), Nana
Patekar has proved his acting prowess time and again. Even though he has
an enviable body of work, and multiple National Awards to his credit,
the 64-year-old likes keeping a low profile.
Here, he gets candid about his style of working, his 42-year-long journey in the film industry, and more.
Why do you stay out of the limelight?That
has helped me survive [in the film industry] for 42 long years. If you
are seen often, it’s not possible for you to last long. I don’t want to
be in the news for no reason.
Did stardom never mean anything to you? When
the camera is on, I am an actor; otherwise, I am an ordinary person.
Stardom is temporary. Someday, it will fade away, and then it will
become difficult to deal with life without it. So, it doesn’t matter to
me even if I travel in an auto rickshaw. There was a time when I
couldn’t even afford an auto rickshaw ride.
Your frank nature has often led to controversies and differences with many people in the film industry. I
have seen several hardships since I was a child. As a result, I don’t
perceive things the way most people do. So, if a director or a producer
tries to convince me about a certain thing, which I feel is not correct,
then we end up fighting. I’m sure people cast me out of compulsion.
They know that if they sign me, they have to suffer me as well (laughs).
I’m a little tough [to work with].
In 2010, you set up a
Twitter account to promote your film, Tum Milo Toh Sahi. Since then,
you haven’t been too active on the platform. Why?Expressing
your views on social media doesn’t solve any problem. You have to do
something about the issue. What is important is what you are actually
doing to solve that problem. I would rather go to the root cause of an
issue, and find a solution, rather than just comment on it.
Are you concentrating more on Marathi films these days? No.
I just did a film called Natsamrat, in which I played the lead. In
Marathi cinema, people are doing some amazing work these days. You get
the chance to do what you feel like doing. That is important. Otherwise,
you are in a rat race to prove that you are an actor, and [you have to
keep] boasting about yourself. When you can afford to be choosy, then
why not?
Are you in favour of the number of remakes being produced in Bollywood these days? We
have exhausted all our emotions. We have no power left to create, and
are more into making easy money. So, we are into remakes. It’s not that
we don’t have stories. We have writers, but we are apprehensive about
making films based on their stories because the makers are not sure of
the return on investment. And everyone has this fear — be it the
producer, the director or the stars.
What made you choose Anees Bazmee’s comedy film?Sometimes
when you do films that deal with serious material, you get fatigued
because, obviously, you borrow the problems of the character and feel
that they are yours. So, it’s not possible to be yourself. You get tired
in the process. And then you get films like this upcoming comedy, where
you can unwind.
So, will we see you in light-hearted films more often?It’s not possible for me to get into this genre frequently. I can’t... I need to connect with certain things [to perform].
You had earlier said that you want to direct a film that would be “unlike Nana”. I
am still writing it. In Bollywood, a love story means that you are
hugging and kissing all the time. But I think that when you are truly in
love, you don’t need to say or do anything. I don’t believe in the
physical [aspect].[My film is] a love story, but it shows my perception
of it.
How A R Rahman brought Bollywood music to the West
With record sales of more than 200 million
albums worldwide, A R Rahman has composed the soundtracks for over 100
Indian films and is credited with more or less single-handedly
revolutionising Indian film music.
On Aug. 15, Rahman performed a one-off “greatest hits” show
at the O2 arena in London. He has brought Bollywood music to the
Western world—with a style that is both new and familiar at the same
time.
The son of a film music composer and conductor in
the Tamil and Malayalam film music industries, Allah-Rakha Rahman got
his big break as a music director doing the songs and background score
for the Tamil film, Roja. In India, film music reigns supreme, and Rahman’s soundtrack took the country by storm.
'Big Bang Theory' Assistant Director Hits Warner Bros. With Age Discrimination Lawsuit
'The Big Bang Theory' Michael Yarish/CBS
There's lots of talk (and some litigation) over ageism in Hollywood with regard not just to actors and actresses, but to directors, writers and other talent. In a lawsuit filed Monday, an assistant director who worked on The Big Bang Theory is joining the conversation. Christopher Klausen filed suit in Los Angeles
Superior Court against Warner Bros. Television, which produces the CBS
sitcom. He claims the studio and members of the production staff reduced
his work on the series over several seasons and illegally terminated
him after the eighth season.
Fifty is the magic number in Klausen's lawsuit. He claims it was
after he hit his 50th birthday that the crew conspired to cut him out of
the production.
With credits from Diff'rent Strokes and The Fresh Prince of Bel Air to Fox's ill-fated Dads,
Klausen has worked as a second assistant director or stage manager (the
positions are similar, his complaint states) and first assistant
director in television for more than 30 years. He started working on The Big Bang Theory as a second assistant director on the pilot, which aired in 2007.
His complaint doesn't cover the years between then and 2012, when he
turned 50. With the show's sixth season in 2012, he says, the producers
reassigned his duties of interacting with the actors to Nicole Lorre, "who was in her early-to-mid twenties," and T. Ryan Brennan, "who was in his early thirties."
It wasn’t just the crew, says Klausen. "Mr. Klausen noticed that the
stars of the show, which are all considerably younger, began to
ostracise [sic.] him after he turned fifty (50) years old," states the
complaint. Read it here.
He claims when he asked producer Faye Oshima Belyeu
why his duties were assigned to others, she told him they "related to
the actors better." States his complaint, "The only reason that Ms.
Lorre and Mr. Brennan 'relate[d] to the actors better' are because they
are younger than Mr. Klausen."
Klausen says with the seventh season, he went from second assistant
director to the uncredited position of second second assistant director,
and his duties were reduced to blocking the actors. Also during the
production of the seventh season, Klausen several times was asked to
stand in for the first assistant director, which he says demonstrates
his alleged lessening of responsibilities was not caused by poor
performance on his part.
'Mortal Kombat': Untold Story of the Movie That "Kicked the Hell" Out of Everyone
The film — which broke the videogame curse 20 years ago this
week — survived broken ribs, bruised kidneys and ridicule from
Hollywood: "Everyone was telling me this wouldn't work and my career
would be over," recalls producer Larry Kasanoff.
Videogame movies may be a risky proposition today, but in 1995 they were seen as hopeless. Super Mario Bros (1993) and Double Dragon (1994) were total bombs — despised by critics and fans alike. The campy Street Fighter (1994) faired better financially, but was still years away from earning a cult following on home video.
So it was against all odds when Mortal Kombat hit No. 1 in
theaters 20 years ago on Aug. 18, 1995. The film grossed $122 million
worldwide and broke the videogame curse as the first adaptation embraced
by fans. Mortal Kombat endured expensive reshoots, broken ribs and
screaming executives during its journey from arcade to screen. That
journey began when producer Larry Kasanoff was visiting some friends at Midway Games in June 1993. He'd previously worked with James Cameron, turning Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) into a merchandising phenomenon worth millions. Among its crowning achievements was the T2 arcade game, a slick, first-person shooter that broke records for Midway.
The guys at Midway showed Kasanoff Mortal Kombat, a new game they said would beat his T2
record. It was bloody, hyper-realistic and already a sensation at the
arcade. But Kasanoff believed it was destined to be more than just a
video game. He envisioned it as a phenomenon on the order of T2. He saw a TV series, stage shows, albums and movies all in its future.
Midway wasn't so sure. "YOU'RE FULL OF CRAP! IT'S JUST AN ARCADE GAME!" In June 1993, Larry Kasanoff is catching up with friends at
Midway Games' offices, who are high on their new arcade sensation,
Mortal Kombat. Their followup Mortal Kombat II was in the testing phase,
and Kasanoff is stunned by his first look at the series, which had yet
to hit home videogame consoles. Larry Kasanoff, producer: I played the Mortal Kombat arcade game in their office for half an hour. I turned to [Former Midway Games chief] Neil D. Nicastro and I said, "This is Star Wars meets Enter the Dragon.
This is not just an arcade game. This is a whole phenomenon." I said,
"If you give me the rights to this, I promise you I will produce this,
not just in movies, but in every medium in the world." He looked at me
and said, "You're full of crap! It's just an arcade game!" That began a
three-month process of me trying to convince them that it was
more than just an arcade game. They didn't believe it. Because videogame
movies had recently failed, like Mario Bros., no one believed it. I
finally just wore them down and they optioned the rights to me for an
insanely short amount of time, which now I would never do, but it was my
first deal at my company. Ed Boon, Mortal Kombat co-creator: When the
movie was being discussed, I remember not taking it seriously at first.
I thought, "This is probably going to be talked about but not happen."
Then all of a sudden we were getting phone calls about casting and they
were saying, "What about this guy for this character? What about this
guy for that character?" I remember them saying, "What do you think of Danny Glover as Raiden?"
Kasanoff: Everyone was telling me this wouldn't work
and my career would be over. Including New Line. They'd already
greenlit the movie, and the studio head walked in with the script, threw
it down on the table and said, "I hate the script. I hate this movie."
And he yelled at us for an hour and then said, "Go ahead and make it." Lauri Apelian, producer: We were getting submissions
for top, top directors. Directors with whole lists of important,
wonderful films. I really wanted to find someone who would have an
innovative, fresh approach. I went to the CAA screening room to see Shopping. Paul [W.S.] Anderson
was an unknown director with this little film. I didn't know anything
about it. I was totally blown away with the talent he had in it. Jude Law, Sean Bean.
They shot it on something like $100K in the streets of London.
Afterwards, I said, "We've got to get this guy." There was no question. Paul W.S. Anderson, director: I grew up in a
northern industrial town called Newcastle Upon Tyne, where there was no
film industry. I would come to London for meetings when I was trying to
get my career off the ground. Quite often, I'd have a meeting at 10
o'clock in the morning and 3 o'clock in the afternoon. I didn't know
anybody in London, so all I would do is play videogames for three or
four hours at the arcade. One of my favorites was Mortal Kombat. So when I heard they were making a movie of Mortal Kombat, most filmmakers were being a bit snooty about it. I was super-enthusiastic. Apelian: Paul would come in every single day with
these amazing, creative ideas with how to shoot something or how to
create some fantastical scene. Because of our monetary restraints, we
weren't able to do exactly what he was coming up with, but it would lead
to something else. Anderson: I had no experience with visual effects,
so I went to Samuel French's book store, and I bought every single book I
could find on visual effects, on matte paintings, on CGI. I had the
jargon down. It sounded like I knew more about CG than anyone else in
Hollywood, even though I'd never been into a visual effects house. I
kind of bluffed my way in, but I think they could see the enthusiasm. THE KOMBATANTS ASSEMBLE Anderson enters pre-production in early 1994, with the script from screenwriter Kevin Droney
still in progress. Hong Kong martial arts veteran Robin Shou is a top
choice for Liu Kang — but landing the part proves to be a grueling
process. Robin Shou, Liu Kang: It was the toughest casting
process. I was working in Hong Kong back then, but I was visiting the
U.S. because I'm from here originally. A friend of mine from an agency
says, "They're casting for this movie Mortal Kombat." At first I laughed because Mortal Kombat is the dumbest name. Mortal Kombat?
A videogame turned into a movie? A good friend of mine kept hounding
me, saying, "You should really go for this. Meet for them." I read seven
times. My agent friend had never heard of anyone who had to read seven
times. I had to read for the producers, the director, the casting
director, the line producer and then my final reading was with New Line.
They were really hands on as far as picking this Asian Liu Kang,
because he's an Asian lead and they're investing millions. It was
grueling. Anderson: The script was kind of being written while
we were in pre-production, which is a challenging thing, but it was a
good thing, because it gave me the opportunity to help steer the
direction. When it came to actually shooting the movie, I really
encouraged the actors to adlib quite a lot. It was a lot of the humor in
the movie. There's a lot of good humor, especially coming form Linden Ashby [Johnny Cage] and Christopher Lambert [Raiden]. Linden Ashby, Johnny Cage: We came up with, "Those
were $500 sunglasses, asshole," and the silly moment in the movie. The
opening when I walk in and I go "let's dance." Boon: [Fellow Mortal Kombat co-creator]John [Tobias]
and I had comments about the script, because I remember at first from
our perspective, it was way too comical. Raiden was cracking jokes like a
prankster and I remember saying, "He's not a clown he's a very serious
character." We didn't write the script, but we read the script and we
sent back comments. Ashby: There was just a lot to improve. And we sat
down and we reworked the script to the point that I think the writer was
not really thrilled with us. I remember seeing [screenwriter] Kevin Droney
at a Christmas party after the movie had come out. And he introduced me
to his date and goes, "this is the guy I told you about. This is the
asshole that ruined my script." (Laughs). I was like, "Oh, hi." It wasn't a script to write home about and we worked hard on it. We didn't write Hamlet or anything, but we had a lot of fun with it.
Apelian: We needed to make the movie PG-13. That was
a tough one, being a very violent videogame. We got in real close with
the ratings board to find out how many curse words you could have, how
much blood you can have. What we learned was if you killed a human on
screen, you got an R rating. What we needed to do was any deaths that
happened on screen where you are showing it, needed to be something
other than a human. If you look at our movie, you had Goro killed on
screen, but you could get away with that and still get a PG-13 rating. Kasanoff: I never thought we were making a movie
based on the videogame. I always thought what we had to do was imply
that the videogame is the first incarnation of some story that exists
sort of one up the pyramid. I always thought there's a story that exists
and the first incarnation of that story was the videogame. Now let's go
back to that story well and see how we can craft a movie from that. It
doesn't contradict the videogame, it adds to it. Apelian: We originally had Cameron Diaz cast as Sonya Blade. We were at New Line when The Mask
was in postproduction, and Cameron Diaz was not a household name. No
one knew her. New Line said, "Why don't you look some of the dailies
that are coming in from this film and see what you think of this young,
unknown actress." As soon as we saw the dailies from The Mask,
there was no question that she was a star. We put her into training,
because she had not really done this kind of martial arts work before.
She broke her wrist right before shooting to the point where she
couldn't do the martial arts stunts we needed. We were very happy with Bridgette [Wilson-Sampras]. It was great she was available. Bridgette Wilson-Sampras, Sonya Blade: The casting
process was really long. I went back and auditioned and met with them so
many times. Probably seven. I kept going back and going back and
meeting with Paul and Larry and the producers. Then I got Billy Madison. So I went and filmed Billy Madison and thought, "Oh my gosh, I'm going to lose the part" because they couldn't make a decision. Then on my last day of filming on Billy Madison,
they called me up asked, "Will you do it if we fly you out the next
morning?" and I said "Yeah!" I was so happy both worked out. Apelian: We also inquired about Sean Connery
for the Raiden role. But we understood at that time that he really
wanted to golf. He wasn't interested at that time in doing a physical
role. For Johnny Cage, we needed to have an actor who could come across
with the cockiness that the character required but still showed the
humanity. Linden came in and had just the right combination of being
that sort of cocky actor while still bringing humanity to the character
and a warmth. With Talisa [Soto]
(Kitana) and Bridgette, we had two characters that were well rounded. I
didn't want the women to be cardboard characters. They needed to have a
strength and an independence and an intellect that went well beyond
their beauty and being sexy. They really were intelligent, strong women. Christopher Lambert, Raiden: I had lunch with Paul
Anderson and Larry Kasanoff, and they offered me the part. They gave me
the script, and it was a fun script. Before I said yes, I watched Paul's
first movie, which was great. Then with the hat, the robe, the white
hair — all this was obviously building the character. In the movie,
because of his powers, he doesn't need to train to practice. That was
also good. It was the one and only action movie you didn't have to train
for. Anderson: When you make your first Hollywood movie,
there's a great danger as a young filmmaker that you will be overwhelmed
by the scale of them. Having the big guy on set, the person who is
being paid the most money, who is the biggest name, be someone like
Christopher really helps you. He was laid back, and he was chill, and
nothing was too much for trouble for him. And that person sets the tone
on the set. Because if it's not any trouble for him, it can't be trouble
for anybody else. Boon: Christopher Lambert did a great job. He
brought a lot of his own personal performance to it. We were thinking so
literally at the time. We were thinking Raiden is from Asian
mythology. We never showed his face that clearly in the game, so we
never really defined a race, but we didn't think the Highlander guy. That wasn't in our heads. Anderson: With Christopher, we did a creative deal
so he only worked for like four or five weeks, for X amount of dollars.
He was expensive, and he wasn't going to be able to come to Thailand,
because he would be going way over what we'd paid him. So I developed
this plan where we were going to do close ups of Chris in L.A. and then
wide shots of a double in Thailand. And then edit it together
creatively. Christopher, when he found out, said "forget about that. I'm
coming to Thailand." He sensed this was going to make it a better movie
if he could be there in those landscapes. And it is. I'm sure his
agents and manager and lawyer were furious with him, because he
basically came to Thailand for free. When he was there, he paid for the
wrap party as well. IT HAS BEGUN The crew assembles for the first part of the shoot in Los
Angeles, before heading over to Thailand for the last month, where many
of the signature scenes were filmed. Ashby: We started out in Santa Monica Airport, where
we shot a lot. We had big sets. There's a bar down there on the south
side of the field, and we used to go there Friday when we'd wrap. Oh my
God. Just crazy stuff. There was a medic who was a funny guy, quirky. He
was very into security on the set. He should have been a security guy
instead of a medic. Tom Cruise had a hanger nearby and
came over and was like, "Hey what are you guys shooting? Can I check it
out?" And the medic goes, "You're not in this movie. Go away!" And Tom
Cruise goes, "I just want to see," and he goes, "I don't care who you
are, get out of here!" He turned away Tom Cruise.
Larry Kasanoff (right) with the expensive Goro animatronic. (Courtesy: Larry Kasanoff) Anderson: Goro was created by Tom Woodruff and Alec Gillis from Amalgamated Dynamics. Tom was the guy in the Alien costume for Alien 3. Goro was
a big creation, with a lot of computers and a lot of guys working
around him. He broke down a lot, and we would have to wait for
him. Goro became the diva of the set. Everyone would joke about it and
say, "Goro won't come out of his trailer." We blocked him and I tried to
shoot him as creatively as possible to kind of shoot around the
limitations of working with a big animatronic like that. We did little
bits of CG enhancement to help with his lip sync and stuff. There was a
production meeting where we discussed taking Goro to Thailand, and I
said, "that's never going to happen. He's barely behaving himself in a
studio in Burbank. I don't know what he'd do in Thailand." Jonathan A. Carlson, production designer: That guy
had 13 to 16 puppeteers. The cables were going all over the place. One
guy would be doing the eyeballs. The other guy would be doing the
eyebrows. The other guy would be manipulating something else. They spent
$1 million on that puppet. When we designed the statuary gardens on the
sound stage, it was meant to have beautiful coy ponds and oversized
lilies and water and reflection pools and at the last minute they were
afraid Goro might fall over and fall into one of my ponds and short
circuit and ruin the electronics. Instead it was, "Let's ruin Jonathan's
design and not put water in it," so we took that part out.
Anderson: The first fight scene I shot with Robin
Shou — Here's a man who has done Hong Kong movies. I haven't done any of
them. We started doing the master shot, and it's this big, long fight,
and we do it all in one take as a wide master. But there are a couple of
mistakes, so I do it again. Then there are a couple more, so I do it
again. And of course these guys are getting exhausted, because they are
going for it. Robin comes up to me and says "Paul, you do know what
coverage is, don't you?" And I said "Oh yeah! Sorry about that." In
fight scenes, you use the wide shot for maybe like two seconds, and
that's it. You're always in for the tight coverage for the impacts. It
was a movie I learned a lot on, and I was very fortunate to be working
with people who were supportive and didn't bite my head off when I made
them repeatedly do fights in wide shots. Shou: When Pat [E. Johnson]
choreographed the fights, he's going to have to make it as comfortable
as possible for me. I had a lot of ideas from whole Hong Kong cinema.
It's a little bit stylized, but it's an action, martial arts kung-fu
movie so it's OK to be stylized. So he gave me free reign to do whatever
I wanted basically. He would give me a scenario and he'll start off the
first few moves and then I would either finish it or just go to the
next few moves the way I feel the flow should be. Then he would give
suggestions. "Maybe we shouldn't do this, because at this point
storywise we need to go to this story point." In a fight scene, there is
still a story point. He would give me that kind of direction and I
would just change the fight according to his direction. Choreography is
like dance. The whole point is from how to get from point A to point B
and Point B to Point C and at Point C you finish the fight. You design
moves that get you from one point to another and then you wrap it up at
the end. I had a lot of input on the fights. Anderson: Going to Thailand was an important
decision, because I wanted to get big, real landscapes. When we went on a
location scout, the beaches I really liked were the ones you couldn't
get to. We had to bring in all of the equipment on a boat every morning.
It was wonderful, because I went to work on a speedboat every day. It
didn't matter how tired you were from the night before. By the time you
got to work with the wind blowing in your hair, going at 60 miles per
hour across this bay, it was fantastic. You were ready to rock. Carlson: Being in Thailand, they had a different
mentality about set building and creating things. I'd say, "Guys, all
these boulders, we've got to move them over here." They'd get about 100
guys and they'd have a cigarette and they'd get around the boulder and
they'd argue about which way to roll it and then they'd roll it one
roll. Then they'd stop and they'd get another cigarette out and yell and
scream more about which way to roll it. Finally you'd come back at the
end of of the day and the boulder would be on the other side. They
didn't just take a backhoe and lift it up and take it over there in five
minutes. "No, no, no. That's not how we do it in Thailand." Then we
found this local guy who owned a lot of heavy equipment. We hired him,
and he came down and smacked everybody around and screamed and yelled at
everybody. After that day it was chop, chop. The first month without
him — it was hell. Nothing was getting done. Pressure was mounting. He
smacked a couple of guys and after that, boy stuff started getting built
quickly. Ashby: In Thailand, there were some guys that went
up river in a big way. It was so hot. And you're shooting in the tropics
and the amount of alcohol that was consumed — you'd stand there and
people would be sweating and it'd smell like a distillery. You'd be
standing next to somebody and they'd just drop down in the dirt. They
were out. Everyone is hurting so badly at this point. You just look at
the guy laying there and you'd be like "Oh. Cut." Nobody even got worked
up about it. Wilson-Sampras: I was the totally straight-laced one
who finished work and went to my room. That was always my MO — so sad. I
do remember they had quite a good time there. I had a blast, just
differently. My mom came with me. Was I even 21 at that point or was I
still 20? We toured around and had a blast. It was the most beautiful
place you've ever seen. Carlson: We took A-B foam to new heights in theater
or film. It's yellow foam that expands 28 or 30 times over its own
weight. It's amazing stuff. It's a derivative of white Styrofoam that
can become hard as a rock or soft as a marshmallow or it can be easily
carvable in a certain mixture. Before you knew it, we were creating our
own world with this A-B foam. We'd take hemp rope and we'd spray it and
it'd foam up and it'd become big vines. Or we'd spray it on plastic and
peal it off and crack it and it would become giant leaves. We had teams
of people going through Bangkok, because back then it was hard to find
Styrofoam in Thailand. I had guys searching alleys and stereo shops all
over in cities, grabbing Styrofoam where they could.
Bridgette Wilson-Sampras on set. (Photo courtesy Larry Kasanoff). Wilson-Sampras: I did all of my own stunts and all
my own fighting, which was awesome. I didn't have as long to prepare as
everyone else did, because they were able to work with the trainers for a
few weeks prior to the filming. Luckily, they pushed my big fight scene
with Kano (Trevor Goddard) at the end when we were in
Thailand filming, so I had the duration of filming to train during lunch
or off times. In the very beginning, I dislocated my shoulder. I did a
partial dislocation, but it was weird because I was totally fine. They
were worried. They made me undergo these tests. They said, "You must
have a shoulder issue and you're not telling us because you're handling
this really well. You must have a trick shoulder." I said, "I swear I
don't. I don't know what happened." They popped it back in and we kept
going. It was all good. Kasanoff: Some of those fights took two weeks to
shoots. There is no fake fighting in there. If you see a guy run and
jump on someone's head and flip them over, he did it. We scoured the
world looking for these unique martial artists and bring them in and
write fights around their skills. So one guy has skill X, we'd write the
fight around skill X to showcase it. Boon: At the time for me, craft services was a
novelty. Seeing people in the costume and hearing them say, "Tomorrow
the guy who plays Shang Tsung is going to be here. Next week we're
shooting the Sub Zero/Liu Kang fight." You could see things were planned
out. This was a very real thing with a budget. It was very cool for
guys in their 20s just seeing what happened with this game turned into a
movie. Producer Larry Kasanoff and Robin Shou on set. (Courtesy Larry Kasanoff) "I WAS PEEING BLOOD" After wrapping in Thailand, test audiences tell the team that the film is great — but there's one major problem. Ashby: We wrapped production and we put together a cut of the film, and they realized it didn't have the big signature fights. Kasanoff: When we tested the first cut of the movie,
the audience response was 100 percent uniform. "We love everything we
see. There are not enough fights in this movie." We went back and spent a
lot more money and we shot more fights. Anderson: We added my favorite fights, which were
the Scorpion fight with Johnny Cage and the Reptile fight with Liu Kang.
We had a very good stunt coordinator, but as the movie went on, I
wanted to embrace more of a Hong Kong, wirework martial arts feel. Robin
was great for that, and he choreographed the extra fights. He was an
actor, but he started as a stuntman in Hong Kong. He worked with Jackie Chan. He had a lot of knowledge. If you look back at Mortal Kombat, it was the first time those big, Chinese wire gags were used in a Western movie. Obviously The Matrix did that to the Nth degree several years later. But at the time, Mortal Kombat was very cutting edge. Shou: Even though this is a movie and you want to be
realistic as much as you can, it's still a videogame movie and it needs
to be stylized. The movement shouldn't stop. The characters shouldn't
take a break or take a breather, because if Scorpion wants to kill
someone, he'll go after the guy relentlessly. The same thing with
Reptile. There are no pauses. There's no, "I knocked you down, I take a
breather and then you get up and we fight again." That's boring! Anderson: Robin would rate the fights. They would be
a one, a two or a three. That would refer to how many ribs he bruised
when he did the fight. The Reptile fight was a three-rib fight, so he
really felt like he'd delivered for me. I remember Linden Ashby as well.
He was eating Advil like they were M&M'S. We just kicked the hell
out of him during that fight. I remember him coming off set going, "I've
never been in so much pain in my life." And I'm like "How many ribs
have you broken? Robin's broken three!" Shou: For the Johnny and Scorpion fight, the
difficult part was to convince Linden that he could do everything. He's
an actor. He said, "Give me as stunt double!" and I go, "Linden, you can
totally do this. The more you do, the more realistic and the more
believable the scene is." He bought it. "Yes, you're getting beat up.
You're bruised, but at the end you are going to look fantastic." Ashby: I was fighting with Chris Casamassa [Scorpion],
who funnily enough was my teacher. Chris did an axe kick to my kidneys
in that fight. I had a pad on but his heel just came right between the
pads and got me in the kidney, hard. I was peeing blood. It hurt a lot. Shou: For my fight with Reptile, it needs to be a
little bit more kinetic. I did everything in that scene. In one of the
stunts, Reptile threw me and I hit this pillar and I actually fractured
two ribs on that, because I didn't expect I'd hit the edge of the
pillar. That was also my tenth take, so I was a little tired. But I
didn't tell anyone. What's the point? If I told them I fractured the
ribs, they're going to stop production and then there goes my Hollywood
dream. I was hurting. I was taking a lot of Advil and then I continued
the rest of the fight with two fractured ribs. I told Keith Cooke,
who plays Reptile, "I'm hurt on the right side of my ribs so don't kick
me there." I muscled through the fight and then went to the hospital. "WE GOT KICKED OUT OF TWO RECORD COMPANIES" The Mortal Kombat soundtrack was bold, using electronic dance
music in a way that normally wasn't done in a Hollywood film. Getting a
record company to sign on became a nearly impossible task. Kasanoff: The soundtrack was the first platinum EDM
record ever in history. We insisted on using electronic dance music,
which at the time was insane. We got kicked out of two record companies.
We had a deal at Sony for a lot of money. In those days you could get a
lot of money for a soundtrack — no longer. We walk in and say, here's
our idea. Electronic dance music. And they go "no, here's our idea.
Buckethead!" He was a guy who played electronic music with a bucket on
his head. We were like, "Well, he's a good guitar player…" they wanted
Buckethead to duel Eddie Van Halen or something. And we
said, "electronic dance music," and they kicked us out. Then we go to
Virgin Records. We walk in and say "Great idea, electronic dance music."
And they say, "yeah, how about Janet Jackson?" By the way, I love Janet Jackson, but we were like, "What? For Mortal Kombat? We get kicked out. Finally we get no record deal. The studio was great by backing us and letting us do that. We made the MK
soundtrack and gave it to this little record company no one had ever
heard of and we came out with the first EDM platinum soundtrack. George S. Clinton, composer: For the first test
screening they had put a temporary score under it that was mainly
traditional orchestral action music, and it became clear that the target
audience, which was used to hearing techno music blasting during game
play, was not happy with that approach. So that gave me the opportunity
to come up with an approach I called “Techno-Taiko-Orcho.” My score
would have a techno core with a layer of Asian ethnic instruments (Taiko
drums, shakuhachi, Tuvan throat singer) surrounded by an orchestra. But
not just a regular orchestra, a Testosterone Orchestra. No treble clef
instruments (no flutes, clarinets, trumpets, violins, etc.). Just 18
violas, 14 celli, six basses and lots of low brass—and percussion. It
was massive. When music supervisors John Houlihan and Sharon Boyle introduced me to guitar wizard Buckethead, I knew he would become a major element in my score as well. Kasanoff: My partner in my company is Jimmy Ienner.
He is among many other things one of the greatest music producers in
history. What you have to have in a fight movie is a driving beat. You
have to have a dance beat. You have to have a beat that makes the
audience move to the fight. Not just watch it from afar. You have to get
them involved. Since it's Mortal Kombat, you have to have
something that is harsh and hip and driving. That's why we settled on
that kind of music. We scoured, looking for everybody. We looked and
went to clubs and found people and got submissions. We've got the best
music people in our corner. We just looked and looked and tried and
tried and tried. That's the process. Music in a movie exists to serve
the movie. To serve the scene. If you watch one of those fights without
the music and you watch it with that music, within 30 seconds you go
"oh, I get it." There was no magic to it other than we knew it was
right. Clinton: The techno songs they chose for the film were killer, including the classic Immortals song, and another challenge for me was making sure the techno part of my score could hold its own. "I WAS SO TERRIFIED" The film goes into post-production, and the team awaits its Aug.
18, 1995 release date. It would surprise everyone by holding the No. 1
spot for three consecutive weeks. Lambert: When Mortal Kombat was being made, the industry very doubtful about it. "We have no idea if it could work." Anderson: I was so terrified of the opening. Was it
going to open? Was it not going to open? Was I going to have a career?
Was I going to get kicked out of America? I thought, "God, the last
place I want to be is in L.A. I just want to go somewhere else." I went
to Hawaii with my girlfriend at the time, and of course we get to the
middle of absolute nowhere in Hawaii and I read the movie is No. 1. And I
go "Damnit! Why aren't we in L.A.? I've got the number one movie. I
should be in L.A. making the most of it." I'd already paid to go to
Hawaii, so we ended up staying there. Boon: I remember waking up on a Sunday morning and seeing on CNN, "Mortal Kombat opened at $23.3 million," which was the second biggest August opening in history, which is huge. It was a big deal. Apelian: None of us had a question in our minds that
it would be successful. We were surprised that it stayed at No. 1 for
three weeks. I don't think we expected all of that. Kasanoff: I had promised [Midway's] Neil
[D. Nicastro] I would turn this into every medium in the world. "OK,
we'll use this guy in the TV series and here's what we'll do for the
show." It was to the extent that the day the movie opens, I got on a
plane to the Catskills to rehearse the Radio City Music Hall show. That
began several years of me going from one Mortal Kombat production to the next. Anderson: After Mortal Kombat, I wanted to try something different. [New Line President] Mike [De Luca] asked me whether I'd be interested in coming back [for 1997's Mortal Kombat: Annihilation]. I ended up doing something very different. I did Event Horizon next, which was super dark and couldn't be more different from Mortal Kombat.
I stretched my wings afterwards. Looking back on it, I went "ah, maybe I
should have done it." It's one of the reasons why on a go forward
basis, when I became involved with Resident Evil, I felt if I'm
going to do another one of these adaptations, this time I'm going to
stay with it. I'm going to really stay with the franchise and shepherd
it. Ironically, me not doing Mortal Kombat II is kind of the reason I've ended up doing Resident Evil I, II, III, IV, V, VI.
Non-stop action: why Hollywood’s ageing heroes won’t give up the gun
ale careers in the movies have always been longer than female ones,
but until recently there was only one real route to on-screen
immortality – to the certified, gold-standard agelessness of, say, Cary Grant.
(In North By Northwest, Grant, then 55, not only appeared opposite a
woman 20 years younger than him, Eva Marie Saint, his screen mother was
played by someone only seven years his senior.) The key principle is
suavity: the refusal to break a sweat; sophistication with the faintest
hint of self‑mockery; the actor letting us know that he is old enough to
know how silly this all is.
There are still disciples following that path up the mountain to the
sunny uplands of longevity – perhaps we should think of this as Mount
Rushmore being reconfigured to include a huge stone likeness of Grant
himself, like the ones he scrambled over so urbanely in North By Northwest.
Over there, do you see? There are George Clooney and Hugh Grant (both
54) in their hiking shorts, clambering for dear life as the career
shadows fall, and a little further down is Colin Firth (also 54), trying
to make sense of the map. Richard Gere (65) is sitting cross-legged on a
boulder and seems to be meditating, though he may just be taking a nap.
Suddenly they all freeze (though with Gere it is hard to tell). What’s
that sound? Gunfire. But it seems to be coming from further up the
mountain, where the old-timers are plainly not putting their feet up.
There is now apparently no age limit to an action career in
Hollywood. The expendables are no longer unemployables, and actors in
their 60s and even 70s are high-kicking in can-can routines of
choreographed violence. After making a third Indiana Jones sequel in his
mid-60s, Harrison Ford
was over 70 when he joined the grizzled crew of The Expendables 3 (with
Sylvester Stallone weighing in at 68 and Arnold Schwarzenegger at 67),
in which the mercenary group does battle with its founder, now resolved
to destroy them. In Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,
the camera keeps its distance from Ford’s stunt doubles – the charisma
of an ageing action star has more to fear from obvious fakery in fights
than from facial close-ups, since not much more is required of him than
rugged scowls and glares of baleful defiance. Ford’s return as Han Solo
in a forthcoming instalment of Star Wars after a third of a century is a
melancholy prospect, like someone dressing up in late life to match a
graduation photograph.
Tom Cruise, now 53 and strongly committed to stunt work, has just appeared in a fifth Mission Impossible
film and signed up for another. By the time of its scheduled release,
in 2017, he will be as old as Bruce Willis was in the first RED
film, when he was Retired (though allegedly also Extremely Dangerous,
to complete the acronym of the film’s title). For Cruise it seems that
the real mission impossible would be calling it a day.
Harrison Ford attends Comic-Con panel: ‘It’s great to be back’ - video
A loophole seems to have opened up, almost a wormhole in the fabric
of Hollywood space-time. Through this portal an entire generation of
veterans is currently trooping – and it is Liam Neeson, 63, who has made
the most drastic and yet the smoothest journey across the genre
universe, with Taken
and its sequels. Steven Spielberg’s Schindler, agonising over whether
he might have managed to save one more life, has been made over into a
killing machine.
Neeson’s Taken character is a civilian whose unending mission is to
rescue and secure his family, which gives him the moral stature to
justify any amount of bloodshed. At the beginning of the story, Neeson’s
character, Bryan Mills, was presented as an overprotective father,
unable to move on from a broken marriage and spending altogether too
much time worrying about the safety of his teenage daughter, Kim,
seeking to control her movements. This could be a psychological drama of
divorce, but then it strays into Bodyguard territory when Bryan agrees
to help out some old friends, who have been hired to provide security
for a moppet pop star’s gala concert but are a man short. In due course,
there is a murder attempt, fitting the Kevin Costner/Whitney Houston
template, and a moment of intimacy in its aftermath, but this too is a
false trail, revealing the hero’s combat skills but not yet explaining
them (he is an ex-CIA operative). Two genre feints in a running time of
only 93 minutes – that’s not bad going. Only when Kim (Maggie Grace)
goes to Paris and is abducted does the film move up decisively in terms
of octane rating. Neeson plays it grim and straight. As Gladiator
showed, audiences attuned to romantic self‑sacrifice (a traditionally
female character arc) will accept a fair amount of violence, and it also
works the other way around, with the stereotypically male element
willing to identify ungrumblingly with a man who has lost the love of
his life and never looks for a replacement.
What’s Neeson’s secret? His physique? Hardly – he has never been one
of Hollywood’s Shirtless Ones, hasn’t even spent much screen time in a
singlet. No doubt he has a fitness regimen beyond what most civilians
would contemplate, but he seems to have no interest in projecting bolts
of testosterone to the back of the auditorium. He moves like a big man
who has learned to be light on his feet.
He has had the advantage of a late start, though it can hardly have
seemed like an advantage at the time. There were plenty of male stars
from Hollywood’s classic period who could not easily be imagined young,
among them the ones who most seem to symbolise integrity: Humphrey
Bogart and Spencer Tracy. A young actor can embody idealism easily
enough (James Spader, say, in sex, lies and videotape, Stephen
Soderbergh’s 1989 drama of fetishism and repression) but integrity is
something that needs to have been tested over time, if not actually by
time. For actors such as Bogart and Tracy (plus James Cagney and Edward G
Robinson, though less reliably virtuous), their heyday was middle age.
Wrinkles formed part of their appeal, rather than undermining it.
Maturity was their present tense, and they had no visual history,
lacking Facebook pages to plunder their own lives and archive the
mistakes of adolescence.
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The
fact that more people are living long lives does not necessarily make
ageing easier, and stardom has become a complicated business, with any
amount of toxic undercurrent, ripples of projected narcissism and
rancour. Stardom has changed because fandom has changed. Fandom in
cinema increasingly follows the model of Kathy Bates’ Annie Wilkes in Stephen King’s Misery,
revealing devotion as something essentially raging and vengeful.
Obsessive love becomes malign stalking. Fame has always had its
drawbacks, but now it seems all downside. To be a celebrity these days
is to be beleaguered and outgunned, to feel at the mercy of every
stranger’s Twitter feed. Perhaps that’s part of the appeal of action
roles to the mature performer. In a world of stalkers, it is tempting
for the world-weary to fire the first shot.
* * *
Celebrity has become an incurable condition, without
remission. I can almost find it in my heart to sympathise with film
stars who ban eye contact on set, or from their staff. Fame is a
treadmill, and having your own gym does not seem to make the legwork any
easier.
When Charlie Chaplin was the most famous person in the world, he
could get rid of his moustache and go more or less anywhere he wanted.
When the Beatles were the most famous people in the world, they had to
dodge the crowds, naturally, but that did not stop them taking time off
without worrying too much about it. Publicity was still a dog that could
be brought to heel – but now thousands of the world’s most famous
people have no possibility of escape from the spotlight they once ran
towards so trustingly. Even seemingly contrived experiments in leading a
normal life, such as Paul McCartney sending his children to state
schools, would be impractical nowadays. The time when a world-famous
film star could announce her retirement, as Greta Garbo did in 1941, and
live out her life in New York without being bothered, even though
anyone who wanted to could discover her whereabouts, are long gone. Only
death can break the spell.
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When
Gore Vidal said of Truman Capote that his death was a good career move,
it was mere waspish provocation, but the same assertion could be made
without irony about Jean Harlow, James Dean, Marilyn Monroe. The
flesh-and-blood person is surplus to requirements once an icon has been
created, and often becomes an active embarrassment.
The prophetic document of the transformation of fame from safe haven
into torture chamber was Robert Aldrich’s hideous 1962 film Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?,
in which a former child actor, now an angry old woman, imprisons her
disabled sister. There had been conscious ugliness in films before, but
if this was meant to be a star vehicle for Bette Davis and Joan
Crawford, then the vehicle it most resembled was a hearse driven off a
bridge. Its greatest effect lay in the sadistic gloating over the ageing
of the actors, whose faces and bodies were showing the effects of the
passing of time, which female film stars are not allowed to do. Davis,
in particular, seemed punished by being put in childish clothing and
portrayed as being trapped in the past, when in fact her screen persona
had always been non-standard and her choices often inventive – her
fading actor Margo Channing in All About Eve, for instance, was by
Hollywood standards a stingingly honest portrait of vanity made
monstrous by despair.
Sylvester Stallone, Antonio Banderas, Jason Statham, Wesley Snipes and
Dolph Lundgren in The Expendables 3 (2014). Photograph:
Allstar/Millennium Films
It is easy to feel that the main event of celebrity culture is now
the showing-up of the failing flesh, and all the acclaim of youth and
freshness that goes before is only a pretext. When identification fails,
when the idol fails to retire gracefully, things can turn nasty. Films
are so centrally about youth and beauty that ageing on screen is a real
taboo. We do not feel sympathetic when our idols reveal themselves as
mortal – we feel betrayed. They have let down their side of the bargain,
and unless they find a way to negotiate a new contract with a degree of
energy and grace, fans become feral.
This used to be primarily the experience of women in films, but these
days there is almost as full a range of options and delusions available
to male movie stars as to their female counterparts. We have seen male
stars go too far down the path of plastic surgery, and others who have
relied too much on what they were born with. There is the temptation to
have a lot of work done, as revealed by Mickey Rourke to gasps of
audience horror in The Wrestler.
And there is the temptation to put your faith in Mother Nature and let
it all hang out, as exemplified by Gérard Depardieu to gasps of audience
horror in Welcome to New York.
There are pages on the internet about “celebrities ageing
disgustingly”. One of the prime exhibits in this rogues’ gallery of
blasphemers against approved self-presentation is Macaulay Culkin.
What has this disgusting brute done? He just stopped being 10 years
old, as he was at the time of Home Alone – a bit of bad behaviour he
shares with everyone else who was born in 1980. Culkin has not even
forced himself on the world’s attention with any great energy, unless
voice-overs for Robot Chicken on TV count. He looks a bit rough, it’s
true. It is enough that he was once the defining image of youth and
innocence, and now falls short of it. In the aftermath of celebrity,
privacy is not an option.
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The
current incarnation of youth in films is not in the equivalent of a
John Hughes comedy, but in Richard Linklater’s high-concept movie Boyhood,
in which Ellar Coltrane is made to age convincingly from child to man
by the drastic decision to film him over 12 years. Linklater’s film
seems to have outwitted the enemy, containing and controlling the
poignancy of the passage of time, but that is just how it looks now.
There is no inoculation against mortality on film, except, strangely,
tragic early death. If Coltrane is spared that, then one day soon he
will be snapped unshaven and with bags under his eyes, and then he will
be all over the media world, the shaming image appearing alongside the
dewiest frame of him from Boyhood.
* * *
What is it about Liam Neeson that gives him
durability when those around him are derided for the solecism of getting
older? If it isn’t his physique, then perhaps it is worth considering
his face. A broken nose can have a whole range of overlapping meanings.
It suggests a bad boy rather than someone who abides by the rules,
though there are many ways of suffering a facial impact, and relatively
few of them corroborate such a character sketch. The decision not to
have the nose straightened seems to offer more reliable testimony of a
character indifferent to vanity. Even if this is a false impression, a
broken nose takes away the potential stigma of prettiness from a male
face. It is certainly a mark of experience of some sort, and an
imperfection that can somehow enhance appeal.
There is no facial characteristic that communicates, however
misleadingly, fearlessness and lack of vanity in women. In film terms,
experience seems to add to a man, but subtract from a woman. Men can
have been around the block a few times, but women are condemned to the
repetition of freshness. It is as if a man can live off the interest of
the time and effort invested in making movies, with a real prospect of
earning the adjective “distinguished”, while a woman is always spending
the capital of her looks, jeered at when she runs into debt or has to
buy back her youth from a surgeon.
Harrison Ford in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008). Photograph: Paramount
Heavyweight dramatic actors often venture into comedy as a way of
extending their durability in the marketplace. Meryl Streep has turned
herself, with some effort and after a fair few duds, into a performer
who can raise a laugh, while Robert De Niro has by now spent more time
spoofing his persona than exploring it. Self-parody has existed in the
movies at least since Marlene Dietrich’s performance in Destry Rides
Again (a 1939 western in which she stars as a crime boss’s girlfriend
who is won over by earnest, non-violent James Stewart while he tries to
impose order on a lawless town), but it is a new development for it to
be a whole career in itself. Of course, it is tempting for writers and
directors to protect their films against laughter by pre‑empting it.
Liam Neeson may or may not have a sense of humour – certainly his appearance on Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant’s Life’s Too Short
on television was as excruciating as anything since De Niro’s turn as
the deluded would-be chatshow host in Martin Scorsese’s The King of
Comedy, but that was the desired effect. Comic relief is certainly not
part of the organising principle of Taken and its sequels, though the
incongruity of Neeson as a skilled assassin was built into the structure
of the first film – something impossible to carry over into subsequent
instalments of what has become a successful franchise.
The level of brutality in Taken is modest by Quentin Tarantino’s
standards, and is excused in plot terms by a number of factors: the hero
being far from home, one against many, racing against time and so on.
But not every actor can make an audience accept the hero leaving a
villain plugged into the mains after he has no more information to give,
or shooting a woman without warning to make sure her husband
understands the gravity of his situation. “It’s only a flesh wound,”
growls Neeson, as if he had done no more than spill red wine on his
hostess’s dress.
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Bruce
Willis, an actor reliant on wisecracks, can make sure that a film such
as RED seems like light entertainment with added gunplay and
punch-throwing, but there is an awkward moment when Willis produces a
bag full of severed fingers in order to identify the bodies of the men
who have rashly just ambushed him. Liam Neeson’s Bryan Mills does not do
anything quite as cold-blooded as mutilating corpses, but if he did, we
would not be shielded from it by the directors of the Taken series –
Pierre Morel, replaced in the sequels by the wonderfully named Olivier
Megaton, both protégés of Luc Besson, Frenchmen shrewdly recycling
American film tropes for the US market. Willis has been quipping his way
out of moral ambiguity since the romantic comedy TV series Moonlighting
three decades ago. Neeson is much less of a known quantity, certainly
in action roles, and at their best the Taken films move him back and
forth across the boundary between defensible and indefensible violence,
never quite losing sympathy, nor ever quite taking it for granted.
* * *
What quality can turn an earnest middle-aged actor
into an action hero? Gravitas is the indispensable element in this
context: the moral stature that can complement physical power and even
make it irrelevant, which seems to be viewed culturally as a male
preserve. This quality is hard to define, though, even as it applies to
men. Perhaps it is simplest to describe it in negative terms, as “what Tom Cruise
will never have”. Some have gravitas and some do not. Boyishness and
gravitas do not go together, and an eager-beaver manner kills it stone
dead. The script of the 1992 film Far and Away, for instance, required
Cruise, in desperate straits, to assert his authority over a horse by
punching it (the setting is the Oklahoma land rush, and he is in a hurry
to stake a claim). As a bit of business, it simply didn’t come off.
There were film actors at the time who could have made it work, and they
are the same ones who could get away with it today, nearly a
quarter-century on: Clint Eastwood, Sean Connery, Harrison Ford. It is
not a matter of physical strength – after all, no horse is actually
being hit. It is down to gravitas: old-style stardom without benefit of
moisturiser.
Gravitas is an accumulated heroic presence that can act as both
armour and arsenal. How many people, for instance, watching Clint
Eastwood in The Gauntlet in 1976, noticed that, while protecting a key
witness in a mob trial, he never shoots anyone? Gravitas is a sort of
abstract firepower that does not need to pull the trigger.
Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation (2015). Photograph: Bo Bridges/AP
Is gravitas even possible for women in the movies? A woman in public
life can embrace the physical signs of seniority as a badge of her
seriousness, like Christine Lagarde of the IMF, who does not dye her
hair and, as a result, appears to stand above the distractions of
vanity. That, however, is not a possible strategy for an actor who wants
to be cast in films. Even going ash blonde is a bit of a risk. Of the
possible claimants, in terms of seniority and eminence (all of them
older than Lagarde), Meryl Streep more or less disqualifies herself by
her reliance on acting technique, her disinclination to establish a
consistent persona across a range of roles. Helen Mirren relies on a
disarming insolence, and her confidence that she will never run short of
desirability seems justified so far. She can have a love interest her
own age or, in RED, even fractionally older, and she is so offhand about
it that nobody even notices how exceptional this is. Of this select
group, only Judi Dench is defined not by being looked at but by looking.
In her best work she outstares the viewer, astringent, judging,
refusing even the admiration she has earned with her rejection of
conventional approval. Female gravitas necessarily has a charge of
wariness, and an actor who waited until after her 60th birthday for a
leading role on the big screen (Mrs Brown, in which she plays the newly
widowed Queen Victoria) will be warier than most. Dench escaped the
workings of Stephen Sondheim’s law of female destiny in showbusiness, as
spelled out in I’m Still Here from the musical Follies (“First you’re
another sloe-eyed vamp / Then someone’s mother, then you’re camp”), and
that doesn’t happen by taking anything for granted.
There seems to be a shortage of intelligent presentations of older women to a grown-up audience. Anyone who has seen Pedro Aldomóvar’s
Women on the Edge of a Nervous Breakdown will have seen the director’s
cheeky casting of Francisca Caballero – his mother – as a television
newsreader. Women who work in front of a television camera and are
unwise enough to pass their 40th birthdays are losing their jobs all the
time, but one look at Almodóvar’s film should convince any sensible
person that newsreaders in their 40s are not slightly too old, but much
too young. What you want, when it is time to hear about the day’s
events, is not some glamourpuss but someone who has been around for a
bit, someone who has seen a few things in her time, a few wars, floods
and Oscar nominations. It gives a bit of context, a sense of proportion.
Film-making, of course, is not about proportion. Stardom has strange
acoustical properties that variously amplify, suppress and distort the
frequencies of the personality involved. It is hard to turn such an
apparatus into a loudspeaker for consciously conveying messages, though
it has sometimes been tried. Subtext needs to stay buried. When Mark
Rydell’s On Golden Pond brought Jane and Henry Fonda together on screen
in 1981, the family reunion seemed to stand in for something more
ambitious, the rehabilitation of a prodigal daughter. The star who had
aligned herself most intensely with the counterculture of the 1960s,
Hanoi Jane herself, was sending the message, using her father as a
stand-in, that all she had ever wanted was to be loved and accepted by
conservative America. No wonder the film felt strained – it had an
agenda as fraught as the AGM of a failing company.
Film stars, offering themselves as screens on to which audiences can
project their fantasies, cannot expect to control the process, except in
the most indirect way. A shrewd film star is both a work of art and its
curator. The supreme practitioner in this line must be Marlene Dietrich
– when you hired her, you got her lighting man, too, so that she
retained full control over the product. Alongside the erotic mystique,
she had a strong hausfrau side, which did not show up on film,
but she certainly kept her glamour swept and dusted. That
professionalism extended to her home, where she received visitors in a
chair placed under a spotlight, with a silver stripe painted down her
nose to correct the proportions that did not meet her standards. Without
any such crude mechanisms, Cary Grant maintained an astonishingly
consistent persona over the decades, defending his narrow range
(stylised ease, controlling suavity) against any possible challenge.
It can happen that stardom simply evaporates, leaving talent intact,
which would be one way of describing Al Pacino’s career – he is still a
performer with magnetism, but has shed what made him so fascinating in
the 1970s, a physicality with elements of both the innocent and the
wild. And sometimes a star persona takes a dogleg, moving into new
territory without an actual break. John Wayne’s last starring role, in
The Shootist (1976), for instance, was enriched by the cancer diagnosis
shared by the actor and the character he played. Sometimes a film star
can have two different and contrasting heydays, as happened with James
Stewart. In his early career, up to The Philadelphia Story in 1940, he
embodied an idealism that did not necessarily exclude slyness (in The
Philadelphia Story, as the reporter at the society wedding, he makes
divorced roué Cary Grant seem smug and obvious). When he started making
films again after his distinguished military service, he had changed. He
was like a bell with a hairline crack, the fundamental note unchanged,
the overtones tending to jangle, and offering rich new resonances of
uncertainty (Vertigo), strained folksiness (Anatomy of a Murder) and
despair (It’s A Wonderful Life) to the directors he worked with.
The first Taken film was made before Neeson’s wife, Natasha Richardson, died suddenly in 2009.
If it seems crass to connect a film star’s changing persona with his
life experiences, then it is a crassness that was built into the
workings of stardom even before modern communications made sure that
there was no such thing as a secret sorrow. Film is porous. An event
such as Neeson’s bereavement echoes backward in time, filling his
segment of Love Actually (widowed father tries to teach his son how to
approach the girl he is besotted with) with new associations, though it
is anything but classic material in itself. His persona has been
enriched with pain and the guilt of the survivor, which adds depth to
the action hero’s trump card, the willingness to take punishment. He
wins not because he is the better fighter, but because he doesn’t care
about himself. Neeson’s presence was always sombre rather than blithe,
so that the sorrow and strain we project on to it only accentuates what
was there before. To have gravitas means to inhabit your history, and
not to be diminished by your losses. And if that isn’t quite the same
thing as real-world maturity, on the big screen it is the best we are
going to get.
