Category: cinema

If there is anyone who knows what is happening behind the scenes in the saga over who will become the next James Bond, it’s Jennifer Salke, the global head of Amazon MGM Studios – home of box-office crown ­jewels including the 007 and Rocky franchises.

Salke was part of the Amazon team that sealed an audacious $8.5bn deal in 2021 to buy the 100-year-old MGM and its celebrated library of 4,000 film titles and 17,000 hours of TV programming – ranging from Gone with the Wind and The Hobbit to The Handmaid’s Tale and Legally Blonde.

Nevertheless, it is the future of the evergreen spy that remains the hottest topic of conversation among movie fans.

The problem is that control of James Bond – at 62 years old, one of the world’s longest-running film franchises – remains largely with Eon Productions in the UK, which is run by Barbara Broccoli and Michael G Wilson. Eon’s strict control even extends to who plays Bond.

Intense media interest has sparked a flurry of speculation naming almost any male actor who might fit the profile – from Idris Elba to Aaron Taylor-Johnson and, more recently, Barry Keoghan, the star of the Amazon hit Saltburn.

Daniel Craig’s last outing as the superspy hit cinemas in 2021, six months after Amazon announced the deal to buy MGM, and, three years on, fans are no closer to knowing who his replacement is.

Salke is neither shaken nor stirred by the hiatus. “There are a lot of ideas [about potential actors] that have popped up that I thought are interesting,” says Salke. “I think there are a lot of different ways we can go. We have a good and close relationship with Eon and Barbara and Michael. We are not looking to disrupt the way those wonderful films are made. For us, we are taking their lead.

“The global audience will be patient. We don’t want too much time between films, but we are not concerned at this point.”

Salke also gives her version of reports alleging that, early on, she got on the wrong side of Broccoli for raising the idea of a Bond TV series.

“It was never really raised in that way,” says Salke, who is conducting the interview via video at an unearthly hour in the morning from her home in Los Angeles.

“When you are looking at iconic intellectual property like that, you look at what the entire long-term future might be. Of course you look at every facet.”

She adds that the MGM deal – designed to vastly increase Amazon’s library in the streaming wars – was “definitely uncharted waters for me”.

Salke’s main office is at Culver Studios in California, which once housed Cecil B DeMille’s operations and where classics such as Gone with the Wind and Citizen Kane were filmed, but she spends about a week a month travelling to parts of Amazon’s film and television empire.

Last week, she was in the UK and acknowledges the increasingly important role it is playing in Amazon’s international film and TV strategy.

Earlier this year, Amazon officially opened its exclusive studio space at Shepperton, where it has shot the third season of The Devil’s Hour. Alongside Netflix, it has made the Surrey film studio complex the second largest in the world.

And in July, Amazon acquired Bray Studios in Berkshire, once home of Hammer Films, to be the production HQ for its $1bn-plus Lord of the Rings TV series The Rings of Power, and the spy thriller Citadel.

“We are increasing our investment in the UK,” she says. “There is a lot coming out of here and it started feeling very obvious to me we needed to sort out boots-on-the-ground relationships. We work as close collaborators; I’m not meddlesome, I’m not here to babysit.”

Salke was responsible for the surprise decision to move production of The Rings of Power to the UK from New Zealand, which has history as the production home of big-screen adaptations of JRR Tolkien’s books.

She says the decision was partly based on the “homesick factor” for stars and overseas crew, due to the country’s remoteness – a feeling exacerbated by tight travel restrictions while filming during the pandemic. “We were running into a lot of issues, people feeling like they needed to be able to get home,” she says. “And as we started to invest more in the UK, it made sense to move.”

Salke began her career in television, starting out at Aaron Spelling Productions in the early 1990s, when shows such as Melrose Place were taking off. She moved to 20th Century Fox Television during the period in which shows including Prison Break, 24 and Modern Family became hits.

In 2018, Salke joined Jeff Bezos’s Amazon empire from NBCUniversal’s entertainment division, where she had helped revive the fortunes of the lacklustre streaming service Peacock with hits such as This Is Us.

Part of the reason for Salke’s most recent visit to London was to host an all-female content showcase. At the event, she said that more than 50% of Prime Video’s global original TV series and films so far this year were from female creators and directors or had majority female leads.

Salke has also had to manage the staff response to Amazon’s recent edict that employees will have to work in the office five days a week starting next year. Nick Bloom, an economist at Stanford University, published a blogpost arguing that it could result in droves of staff leaving, particularly in certain demographics such as women, “making for a white, young, male workforce”.

“[There has been] a kind of mixed response, which is understandable,” she says. “We’re really just going back to where we were [pre-Covid]. It’s not some regimented ‘you must be in the office five days a week’. But we expect the company to operate as an in-office workplace as we did. We want people to feel connected to a team.”

The topic of gender parity, and the wider theme of leadership, resonates strongly with Salke.

“I do think I am a little unique in the fact I am a very transparent, warm leader,” she says. “I demand integrity and honesty, I’m very much a no-bullshit leader as well as a no-bullshit person. I have a strong meter for that. I show up as myself and I am as honest as I can possibly be.”

CV

Age 59

Family A husband, Bert, and three adult children.

Education BA from New York University.

Pay Undisclosed.

Last holiday Summer weeks with family on the beach in Long Island, New York state.

Best advice she’s been given “Don’t be afraid to have a really hard honest conversation.”

And the best advice she gives herself? “Be a good listener, stay humble and use your voice.”

Phrase she overuses “Awesome.”

How she relaxes “I love to travel all over the world so I’m lucky to be in a global business. I have endless energy for it!”

Robert Harmon, director

The screenwriter Eric Red said the idea for The Hitcher came to him when he was driving in the rain and thought of the Doors’ song Riders on the Storm. Specifically the line: “There’s a killer on the road.” John Ryder, the film’s hitchhiking serial killer, was originally described by Eric as having a damaged larynx, meaning he spoke using an electronic voice box. In those early drafts, he was much more monstrous – just a force of evil.

I thought that approach was too simple and wanted to make him more appealing, to suggest there was a heart in there. Ryder is a deliberately ambiguous character – flesh and blood, but with room for a supernatural or mythic reading. While we were making the movie, I’d ask: “If Jim Halsey hadn’t been driving down that particular highway in the rain, would anyone have been standing there?”

Initially I was after Terence Stamp to play the hitcher. He turned the part down but years later I ran into him at a party and he said that, having seen the movie, he wished he’d done it. I think Terence and Rutger Hauer have qualities in common. Their eyes are like jewels – they look like they are not of this Earth. For Jim, I needed someone who seemed ill-equipped to deal with the situation he found himself in, but whose countenance is completely different by the end of the movie. C Thomas Howell was perfect: he’s always seemed younger than his real age.

Rutger came to me with an idea for the scene where Ryder lies on the bed in the dark next to Jennifer Jason Leigh as Nash and she assumes he’s Jim. He said: “I’d like to read poetry to her.” I thought: “How can that possibly work? She’ll know it’s the wrong voice.” But I was a very green director and remembered Rutger’s beautiful “tears in rain” scene from Blade Runner. When we rehearsed the scene, Rutger recited his own godawful poetry and I thought: “This is the end of my career. I’m dead.” He finished, came over and said: “It doesn’t really work, does it?” “You know what?” I said. “I kind of think you’re right.” I felt like the luckiest man in the universe.

I’ve often seen The Hitcher described as a horror movie, but that’s not a genre I’m interested in. The original script was much more violent and had moments I thought went too far. For example, when Jim finds a severed finger in his burger and fries, the script originally called for an eyeball and a note from Ryder saying: “I’ve got my eye on you.” Still, despite the fight put up by HBO all the way through filming and even into post, there was never any question we weren’t going to kill the girl.

C Thomas Howell, played Jim Halsey

So many people have said to me: “Oh my god, I had nightmares over that scene where Jennifer was ripped in half. I can’t believe you shot that!” Well, we didn’t. You see her tied between two trucks and Ryder stepping on the gas and the tyres spinning – but then the scene fades out. The movie encouraged audiences to use their imagination.

It was my second picture with Jennifer and I marvelled at how she committed to the character of Nash. Nash’s relationship with Jim is beautifully innocent, and I’m glad it’s not romantically driven – there may have been a sex scene in an earlier version of the script, but The Hitcher is better for not falling into that cliche.

Rutger seemed to terrify everyone on the production and was pretty much left alone. I think he enjoyed the power he had over people. About three weeks in, he said: “I think we should have lunch together.” I went to his trailer and we sat in dead silence as he chain-smoked filterless Camel cigarettes. After an eternity, I mustered up some courage and in my squeaky teenage voice said: “Rutger, what’s your secret to playing bad guys?” He took a long drag of his cigarette, leaned into my face, slowly exhaled and whispered: “I don’t play bad guys.” I just gathered up my things, thanked him for lunch and backed out of the trailer.

That phrase rattled around in my head for years, until I had enough life experience to understand the importance of injecting humanity into villainous roles. There are moments in The Hitcher where Ryder looks at Jim with utter empathy. He expresses fear, too, the full body of emotions. I didn’t question any of Rutger’s improvisations – whether he was scooping a tear off my cheek with a knife, adding a little quartz rock to the handkerchief full of bullets he pushes across the table, or putting pennies in my eyes. The moments he added that weren’t in the script were unexpected gifts.

The scene where Jim forces two police officers to take him into custody was an important one for me. After Ryder appears and shoots the cops, the script had Jim running away from the crashed patrol car and falling to the ground, but right before the take I still wasn’t sure how I was going to play it. I scooped up some dirt and rubbed it on my face, and as I looked up into the sky the clouds happened to part and the sun hit me. Most directors would have said: “We had a change of light. Let’s shoot it again.” But Robert kept rolling. John Seale, the cinematographer, is a true artist who understands how to make a moment better. He got a separate shot of the sun coming out from behind a cloud and cut it in, so we got this brilliant moment in the middle of the movie where Jim stands up in the sunlight as if he’s been reborn.

Filming for a new movie starring Daniel Day-Lewis was interrupted when traffic wardens in Chester began putting parking tickets on 1980s vehicles being used in the backdrop of a scene.

Day-Lewis has come out of retirement for Anemone, which his son Ronan Day-Lewis is directing, and is starring alongside Sean Bean and Samantha Morton.

Filming for the feature took place in Handbridge in Chester this week, but ran into some difficulties after the council declined an application for a road closure, and traffic wardens began issuing tickets for the prop vehicles parked on double yellow lines.

Pictures taken by a resident showed yellow parking tickets stuck to the windows of a number of vehicles, including a Ford Escort van, with production crew and filming equipment visible in the background. A row of late 20th-century vehicles can be seen parked along the road, where extras were reportedly being filmed for the backdrop of a scene.

Matt Carter, a councillor for the Handbridge Park ward, said the council had decided to refuse a full road closure application as it was assessed as being too disruptive for residents, who could have been cut off because of roadworks nearby.

“On the basis of the overall disruption it would cause, they said no on this occasion,” he said. “[The film company] hadn’t applied to suspend parking restrictions in that area so wardens were sent to ticket the cars in the same way they would for any vehicle.”

Carter said a separate request for parking technical support vehicles in restricted areas had been granted, but that did not include the vintage vehicles being used as background props.

He posted a statement from the council on social media that said: “Cheshire West is a film-friendly borough and supports where possible all filming in partnership with the national film office. Careful consideration is always given to each request and in this case, not all of the production requests could be permitted as they would have put too much pressure on the busy roads.”

Anemone is being made by the US independent production company Focus Features and will “explore the intricate relationships between fathers, sons and brothers, and the dynamics of familial bonds”.

It marks Day-Lewis’s first acting project since 2017’s Phantom Thread, after which he announced he would “no longer be working as an actor” and largely removed himself from the public eye.

It is not known whether Day-Lewis, 67, and his co-stars were on set at the time the traffic wardens began ticketing, although they have been seen on location around the north-west in recent days.

Cheshire West and Chester council has been approached for comment.

All Ella Purnell ever wanted to do was write children’s books about magical trees and talking ducks and happy bunny rabbits, and instead here she is chainsawing a man’s head off in a radioactive wasteland. Or freezing to death in the wilderness and being eaten by her closest friends. Or being so traumatised by school bullies that she takes up serial killing, slaughtering victims with her dead dad’s treasured pocketknife.

It might not be exactly what Purnell had in mind for her 20s, but spending the past few years committing, and being subject to, acts of stomach-churning violence has certainly had its upsides: the Londoner is now on the brink of TV superstardom. Purnell has been on a steep trajectory since 2021, when she appeared in hit US drama Yellowjackets as the prom queen captain of a New Jersey high school football team left stranded in a Canadian forest after a plane crash (think Mean Girls meets Lord of the Flies). In April, she starred in Amazon’s sensationally successful video game adaptation Fallout as Lucy MacLean, a vault dweller in a post-nuclear apocalypse United States who surfaces to search for her kidnapped father (the series attracted 65 million viewers in its first 16 days of release, and helped Purnell accumulate 1.4 million Instagram followers). Now, the 28-year-old is returning to the UK for more viscerally disturbing action. In new Sky Atlantic thriller Sweetpea, she plays Rhiannon Lewis, a receptionist whose mounting fury at being walked all over eventually erupts into a murderous spree.

Purnell isn’t sure why she’s ended up specialising in such troubling material. “People think I must be really messed up, but I swear I’m a happy, well-adjusted human!” Seated on a sofa in the corner of a blindingly white photography studio – the dramatic purple eye makeup from her shoot still intact – Purnell certainly seems psychologically sound; relaxed and genial, with a kind of preternatural confidence (even by American standards: a recent New York Magazine profile described her as “strikingly self-assured”). Yet the actor also joins me in identifying as a total wuss: “I can’t do horror films. I don’t really love watching too much gore, or any supernatural things. I’m not even really a big sci-fi person. And I’m not a gamer. So I don’t know how any of this has happened!”

In truth, there is a logic behind Purnell’s CV – and it can be traced back to the ambivalence with which she has approached her profession. Purnell “never really planned on becoming an actor. I feel a lot of guilt and impostor syndrome attached to that statement, because I know a lot of people have wanted to be an actor ever since they were kids. And that just wasn’t me.”

Confusingly though, Purnell actually was an actor when she was a kid. Growing up in east London, she took singing and dancing lessons at the storied Sylvia Young Theatre School, which led to her performing in Oliver! in the West End when she was 10. She appeared in her first film when she was 14 – playing Keira Knightley’s character Ruth as a child in Never Let Me Go. But as her career picked up further in her teens, she “freaked out” about the path that had been laid out for her (not by parents or agents, she clarifies, but a road she had unknowingly carved out herself). At 18, she decided to put the brakes on her acting career. “I wanted to go to university and be a writer – I wanted to write children’s books.”

Purnell won a place at university (she can’t remember exactly where or what she was going to study, but it was related to creative writing), but ended up deferring after landing a part in Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children – working with Tim Burton was her childhood dream and she couldn’t bring herself to turn it down. She thought it would be a one-off, but more irresistible jobs cropped up, such as the lead role in a US TV show. In 2017, Purnell moved to New York to star in Sweetbitter – a series about a young woman who comes of age working in the city’s buzzy restaurant scene – and relinquished her university place. “I realised I didn’t need to go to university to be a writer – I could just write!”

Despite her fixation on writing – she hasn’t written a children’s book yet, but thinks she “probably will one day” – Purnell set off back down the acting avenue with renewed purpose. The fact she wasn’t desperate for success gave her the freedom to pursue only the most challenging, difficult and stimulating parts – an impulse that drew her to stories that deal in emotional and physical extremes. With Yellowjackets, she was enticed by the challenge of taking “this stereotypical mean girl and breaking her down. I wasn’t sure if I could do it in a way that felt tasteful and not tropey. And it scared me.”

Fallout also pushed Purnell well outside her comfort zone. Not only was she taking on some precious source material with a fervent built-in fanbase (the show is based on the beloved video game series), but Lucy herself would have been a challenge for any actor: you just try pretending to be a bouncy, privileged naïf raised in an underground vault modelled on 1950s America whose quest to find your father on the nuclear war-torn surface allies you with a 200-year-old ghoul hell-bent on selling your organs while decimating your entire moral code.

Yet Purnell aced the brief. In her masterful hands, Lucy’s journey from priggish innocent to imperious action hero wasn’t just entirely plausible, it was uplifting, too: seeing such a beautifully rendered bildungsroman unfold across a ravaged planet proved strangely life-affirming. The show – wryly funny, deeply horrifying, breathlessly entertaining and a smash hit by every metric – transformed her life. “There’s the day before Fallout comes out and no one knows who you are, to a week after Fallout comes out and suddenly people know your name. That’s a slightly disorienting experience.” Still, the actor views it as an overnight success 20 years in the making. “I feel like it became a marathon and not a sprint. It didn’t feel as shocking to me as when somebody goes viral overnight.”

She never worries about the hype going to her head. “I have an incredible support system who would never let me get too arrogant.” It includes “three younger brothers whose main mission is to humble me any opportunity they get”. Their primary focus is on “how short I am. And for context, I’m not that short. I’m 5ft 4in. But they’re all like 6ft.”

In the wake of this heady career high, Sweetpea might sound like an odd choice. The show, which airs on Sky this month, is unlikely to have quite the same reach as Fallout, which was the most watched show across all streaming platforms in April. It also marks Purnell’s return to the UK, having already established herself in the US big leagues. Technically she still lives in London, but she has worked so much in the States – and played so many Americans – that some colleagues have been shocked to learn she’s English. (“It’s a great compliment … Well it’s better than: ‘God, her accent’s so shit,’ isn’t it?”)

On the other hand, Sweetpea is the perfect step up. Purnell gets to be an executive producer for the first time, meaning she was involved in developing the series outline and the scripts, and also “got a large say in the visual elements. The hair and makeup is my favourite thing.” The actor – who remained glossily beautiful even in the gruesome Fallout finale – is practically unrecognisable as the downtrodden Rhiannon. It’s amazing what havoc a wispy fringe can wreak on a person’s appearance, but there were other details, too: “I’ve dyed my hair enough times to know what doesn’t look good, so having a mousy element to the hair that makes me look paler, highlighting the dark circles under my eyes, no makeup, being quite plain-looking.”

Reeking of awkwardness, loneliness and low self-worth, Rhiannon spends her life being either ignored or avoided. She’s a wannabe newspaper reporter who is frighteningly delusional about her crimes – yet her mission to fight back against a world that has mistreated her is surprisingly easy to get on board with. Although the series was designed as a prequel to CJ Skuse’s Sweetpea books, the Rhiannon in those is an out-and-out sociopath who derives huge satisfaction from killing, and is more “snarky and definitely a lot more evil”, says Purnell.

This TV version is clearly concerned with making her as sympathetic as possible. Purnell was compelled by the puzzle of creating a female killer viewers could connect with. “Women are so often pressured to be likable and pretty and perfectly packaged,” says Purnell, meaning it’s “a lot harder to create moral complexity”. She “empathised” with Rhiannon “but didn’t relate. I had to really do some mental gymnastics to understand [her behaviour].”

In the end, the team – which includes writer Kirstie Swain (Pure) and director Ella Jones (Back to Life, The Baby) – opted to focus on Rhiannon’s childhood trauma. We see repeated flashbacks to a school disco, where a bully called Julia snatches the wig Rhiannon wears to disguise the fact she’s pulled out most of her hair due to the stress of being tormented by Julia. When the latter, now an estate agent (played by Nicôle Lecky, best known for BBC Three drama Mood), is tasked with selling Rhiannon’s home, passed down to her and her sister by her late father, you can’t help but feel sorry for Rhiannon – despite her barbaric reaction. “When you go through an intense trauma, you get stuck in this arrested development,” says Purnell. She was determined to give Rhiannon a childhood bedroom untouched since adolescence (boyband posters, cuddly toys); she also petitioned for her to wear chunky black rubber-soled school shoes.

The actor clearly took immense care with Rhiannon: the result is a walking moral conundrum from whom it is difficult to look away – I don’t think I’ve ever had such conflicted feelings towards a fictional character. Once Rhiannon starts killing people, things begin to look up for her: she gets a promotion at work; the guy she likes stops dodging her. “She starts to feel more powerful and then obviously the more power you feel, the more power you exude – people read that energy. If you take away the murder, it’s quite a sweet coming-of-age story.” You can’t really take away the murder, though. The brutality and trauma that radiates through Sweetpea did “take a toll” on Purnell. She mitigated the effects through self-care – calling friends, watching TV, messing about with the crew – “because otherwise it could lead you down some dark paths. The job’s not worth your mental health.”

Evidently Purnell takes not being messed up extremely seriously, but some experiences on set left a lasting impression. When filming Rhiannon’s first murder, Purnell was told to maniacally stab a rubber dummy rigged up with blood bags for five solid minutes as the cameras rolled continuously. At first she didn’t want to – “It’s a little bit embarrassing” – but “after the first minute, I closed my eyes so I couldn’t see anybody, and just went in. I kind of blacked out.” Watching it back, she “had to look away because it was so uncomfortable to see myself in that state”. For the first time in her career, she had “lost 100% of my inhibition, going back to this very raw, animalistic version that probably does reside in all of us”.

By the end of Sweetpea, Rhiannon is in full flight-or-blood-spattered-fight mode: the show concludes with a scene so disturbing I can’t bear to rewatch it (and it’s one I am under strict instructions not to reveal). “Oh don’t, it’s awful. It does haunt me,” cries Purnell, throwing her hands over her face when I mention it (a move she repeats when I bring up a moment from Fallout that is also burned on to my retinas). She may still be reeling from all the things she’s done on screen, but it’s a price worth paying: when it comes to difficult – and disturbed – women, nobody is outperforming Ella Purnell.

Sweetpea is on Sky Atlantic, 10 October, 9pm.

Say this for The Platform 2: it gets right to it. Without so much of a recap of its predecessor – a sci-fi horror parable that became a Netflix hit a few years back – characters are debating philosophies of law and economics inside of 10 minutes. By the 40-minute mark, a major character has already committed self-immolation. It’s remarkably fast-paced for a movie set in a series of unadorned rooms that make up an enormous vertical prison.

The workings of this prison were detailed in the first film, and are easy enough to pick up this time around, even without much newbie-friendly exposition: prisoners, who can opt into the structure called the Pit for punishment or in some other kind of exchange, are randomly assigned a different level each month, usually shared with another prisoner. Once a day, a mobile platform descends from the top (level 0) to the bottom (somewhere in the 300s, it’s thought), packed with a succulent variety of foods, lingering for a few minutes on each floor. (Each prisoner gets to pick one favorite item to be included.) Prisoners at the top can, if they so choose, selfishly avail themselves of whatever they want within the time limit. If (when) they do, greed begets more greed, inevitably leaving little to nothing for the poor, desperate souls on the bottom. Of course, everyone’s fortunes can change on a monthly basis; someone on top could easily be shunted down to the bottom, and vice versa. These constant changes should inspire empathy; mostly, they inspire panic and more practically minded selfishness. In other words: eat up now, because who knows where you’ll be next month.

As the sequel begins, the prisoners have organized, putting their own unofficial but exacting rules into place: each prisoner must only eat the food they specifically requested, and nothing more, unless someone else agrees to a trade. If everyone abides by this, theoretically no one will go hungry. Easier said than done, of course; all it takes is for one person to eat someone else’s pizza, bad roommate-style, to throw things out of balance. That’s the precise situation that Zamiatin (Hovik Keuchkerian) encounters on his first day in the Pit. A grim-looking man who walks around shirtless and shaves every part of his body that he can reach, presenting as a tough-guy vulgarian, Zamiatin demands swift justice. His bunkmate, Perempuan (Milena Smit), meanwhile, urges caution. Surprisingly, she does get through to him, and they become genuine friends even as other clashes ripple through the various levels. Soon the pair finds themselves embroiled in a conflict between a self-designated “anointed one” who insists on fundamentalist enforcement of the rules (dictating, for example, that if a prisoner dies, their food must be discarded, not redistributed) and those who agitate for greater “freedom” (despite the fact that none of them are really free at all).

Their place within this conflict changes so quickly the movie might induce whiplash. Even the movie’s central metaphor keeps shifting; at times, it takes aim at the questionable economics of capitalism, the questionable feasibility of true social or economic equality, the fervor of religious true believers, and the nasty violence that may be inherent in human nature, among others. Returning director Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia tears through all of these worthy subjects in a chaotic, bloody scrum that includes weaponized cannibalism, harrowingly nonsensical backstories and other manners of grotesquerie both visual and narrative.

The grindhouse thought experiments can be engaging, and a sign that the movie is more interested in speculative fiction than in preaching toward a single specific theme. But the movie rampages too quickly and carelessly to really dig into any of its characters; Perempuan emerges as the lead, and though Smit is fine in the role, the ground beneath her keeps shifting. Eventually, the movie skips ahead to something more novel: an eerie, green-lit sequence that brings both sci-fi and slow-building suspense back into the proceedings. (Even the ever-present blood splatter becomes more poetic.) Then it barrels ahead further, into a head-scratching final stretch that doesn’t gain any clarity by continuing on into the end credits. Gaztelu-Urrutia seems to be regarding his own concept from level 0, treating it as a frantic all-you-can-eat buffet that may be snatched away at any moment.

Not so long ago, the trailer for next year’s Minecraft movie seemed to go out of its way to become the single ugliest thing ever witnessed by humankind. Not only did it feature real life actors weaponising the worst facets of their personae, but the CGI – unable to decide whether it wanted to look like the source material or Pixar – fell between the two, giving us creatures that looked as if they were made in the glass boxes that Japanese farmers use to make square watermelons.

However, as awful as the Minecraft trailer looked, the gauntlet has now been thrown down. Deadline has announced that Paramount is making a movie based on the 1990s animated cartoon Rugrats. But what stands to launch the film into the all-time ugly movie hall of fame is this: the Rugrats movie is going to be a live-action/CGI hybrid.

Now, try to cast your mind back to what Rugrats actually looked like. Developed in the late 1980s by the husband-and-wife team of Gábor Csupó and Arlene Klasky, Rugrats was born in an era of non-traditional character design. This was the age of Ren and Stimpy, of Beavis and Butt-Head. An age where even the white-bread mid-century superhero Mighty Mouse could be reimagined as something warped and ironic.

But even compared with these shows, Rugrats was weird to look at. Tommy Pickles, the show’s one-year-old lead character, has a huge and dented head that makes him look like something crossed between an overripe mango and a human brain. His friend Chuckie Finster has raving dots for eyes and hair that looks like someone has kicked a nest of snakes. Even though Tommy’s cousinAngelica tried to disguise it with her hair, there’s no denying that her head has the exact dimensions of a pear. This is all by design – during development Csupó said that he wanted his characters to look “strange” rather than “cute”. But this is because the design of the characters was two-dimensional.

That changed in 2021, when Paramount+ launched an all-CGI version of Rugrats. Rendered in three dimensions, the new series was initially off-putting but ultimately fine. It didn’t take long to adjust to the horrors of seeing a testicle-headed baby stagger around looking like a 1996 Windows screensaver. The public may have thought differently – the series had little of the cultural impact of the original – but it was a broadly successful experiment.

However, I put it to you that this was because the 2021 Rugrats series was entirely computer-generated. The babies were CG. The parents were CG. The houses and gardens and streets were CG. The reason that it worked was because you could watch it and quickly assure yourself that it was OK, because everything was uniformly weird.

The problem with Deadline’s announcement, though, is the word “hybrid”. This will be a film where real people will have to share the screen with computer-animated characters. Same as in the Paddington movies, or the Sonic the Hedgehog movies, or the Woody Woodpecker movies. However, those worked because the humans were interacting with animals, not screaming, stumbling babies with voices that make them sound like chain-smoking old ladies and heads that look like cysts.

And yet, presumably, in the Rugrats movie this is exactly what’s going to happen. You might be wondering what the balance will be between live action and CGI. Will there be CGI babies and human adults? Will the entire Pickles family be CGI, and they’ll move into a neighbourhood of normal humans? Honestly, I can’t see it mattering. However it shakes down, this will still be a movie about regular human beings who will be forced to look at a succession of pulsating, blob-headed characters who all to some degree look as though they’ve made several trips through the Brundlefly teleporter.

As much as Deadline is framing this like new news, the truth is that a live-action/CGI Rugrats has been on and off the cards for six years now. The project keeps inching forward and then retreating. This is likely to be because the only feasible story to tell about a world where monstrous computer-generated Rugrat babies crawl around actual people is The Elephant Man. It has to be a story where Tommy Pickles finds himself surrounded by thousands of people who are equally fascinated and horrified by the way he looks, and this miserable existence forces him to question the worth of humanity. This is the only story that this combination can possibly provoke. And you know what? I’d watch it.

Not counting a couple of spin-offs, this is the seventh feature in the V/H/S horror franchise, which since the first edition in 2012 have packaged together short films by different directors to tell creepy tales involving found footage or aliens (or both) as well as lots and lots of gore. Usually anything this many generations into its evolution is pretty exhausted – but this is pretty good, or at least in parts. It probably helps that Brad Miska, the producer behind the original concept, is still involved. More importantly, Miska has kept things fresh by finding new directors and writers for each edition, some of whom have gone on to make films on a bigger scale (such as Joe Swanberg, Ti West and Adam Wingard, all of whom contributed to the first V/H/S) or came aboard after having already become relatively successful just for the fun of it (Scott Derrickson).

Naturally, this latest package is a pretty mixed bag. The framing story, Abduction/Adduction, is a haunted house snoozer that poses as a mockumentary, complete with VFX guys explaining how they can tell footage is faked. (Usually being shot on VHS or low-grade digital is the giveaway, with its glitches and artefacts that make things harder to see – which is funny because that applies to so much of the footage here.) Stork is next, and is just an excuse to try out a ton of in-camera and special effects as a Swat team specialising in paranormal situations raids a house and meets a freaky avian-like alien monster.

Things start to pick up with director Virat Pal’s Dream Girl, a Mumbai-set tale that unfolds on a Bollywood film set where the glamorous leading lady (Namrata Sheth) is rumoured to be a witch. (Spoiler: it’s even worse than that.) Live and Let Dive really lets rip with the POV-camera device common to so many V/H/S segments by attaching the rig to a man afraid of heights about to go skydiving with his buddies for his birthday, a trip interrupted by a close encounter that makes for the worst birthday ever. It earns bonus points for setting the final chase in an orange orchard, which makes for a very effective setting for prey and predator pursuits.

My personal favourite though is Fur Babies, a very tongue-in-cheek effort directed by comedy actor Justin Long and his director brother Christian Long. A shaggy dog story, literally, it revolves around a bunch of animal rights protesters who decide to infiltrate the home of Becky (Libby Letlow, hilarious), a dog daycare owner who has a sideline in grotesque taxidermy. Never has mention of something “crossing over the rainbow bridge” seemed so ominous. Finally, Kate Siegal’s Stowaway is anchored by a persuasive performance from Alanah Pearce, playing a UFO chaser searching in the Mojave desert for aliens who, unfortunately, finds exactly what she was looking for. In truth though, the writing is a little flat and less persuasive here.

Cinema is a hell of a drug. For movie lovers, a trip to the pictures is just that, a two (or, increasingly, six) hour psychoactive escape from the drab outside world. The rushing highs, the crushing lows, the kaleidoscopic lights, the bombastic sounds; and that’s just the Pearl & Dean indent. But while cinema is also full of drugs – from 1894’s Chinese Opium Den right through to, er, 2023’s Cocaine Bear – film-makers have been coming up with fictional drugs (not available in the real world) to rewire narratives, change characters’ personalities and take audiences to brave new worlds without the need for goofy superpowers, confusing procedures or gimmicky magic.

Ironically, though, cinema’s phoney pharmaceuticals are used to highlight what’s happening in the real world, as film-makers are playing on our fears surrounding Big Pharma and synthetic drugs. Take The Substance, the new body horror from Coralie Fargeat, revolving around a drug of the same name that draws on recent weight-loss magic formulas and seems to have anticipated the Ozempic craze. Half Dorian Gray, half David Cronenberg, it begins with fading starlet and TV aerobics host Elizabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) getting fired by sleazy exec Harvey (Dennis Quaid) for being too old. Giving into temptation, she orders a batch of the Substance from a shadowy firm and injects herself with a (suitably Brat green) fluid in her strangely empty bathroom. Suddenly, a nubile clone prises her shoulder blades apart and crawls out of her spine. Meet Sue (Margaret Qualley): Sparkle’s better, prettier half. There’s a catch, of course; she must switch between each body every week; take a “stabiliser” shot every day to stop her from getting sick; and continue feeding her other body. And side effects occur: namely, headaches, tinnitus and, oh, turning into a grotesque ogre with an amorphous amalgamation of flesh that would make Gollum grimace.

“I think that fictional drugs speak at the same time to our imagination and to our strong human nature which, from the beginning of ages, [has wanted] to escape reality and live new experiences,” Fargeat tells the Guardian. No wonder, then, the film was peddled with the tagline “#TryTheSubstance” to tempt people to a ticket. “Cinema is a kind of drug in itself that allows us to escape from reality,” Fargeat adds. “I remember that when I was younger I’d rather live my life in movies than in reality. So, in a way, fictional drugs in movies give you an escape … x2!”

Stanislas Reydellet, production designer on The Substance, says: “Coralie had a very strong initial desire to associate The Substance with a very addictive hard drug like heroin. Something which, once you start, you can’t stop.” But these new kinds of high aren’t all that new. Harry Shapiro, one of the UK’s leading drug consultants and author of Shooting Stars: Drugs, Hollywood and the Movies, traces the fictional drug film back to the earliest adaptations of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. “He swallows an unknown potion and it interestingly brings out the demonic side of his nature,” Shapiro says. It demonstrates the duality that drug use catalyses. “It plays on the guilt trip of addiction,” he adds.

The psychotropic trope really took off, though, in 1972, with Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, based on Anthony Burgess’s cult novel. Alex and his droogs indulged in all sorts of drugs, including spiked dairy drink milk-plus. Over a decade later, David Lynch’s Dune brought melange, or “the Spice” (not the man-made “Spice” ravaging poorer communities, but a fictional equivalent), an inhalant that promises its user prescience, to life. Earlier this year, Dune: Part Two continued the story. “Spice is power,” the movie begins. Unfortunately, it’s wildly addictive and can only be harvested on the acrid desert planet Arrakis, guarded by giant sandworms. Godspeed! In the 1990s and 2000s, scores more fictional drugs entered the collective cinematic consciousness, including black meat (a powder taken from the guts of giant Brazilian centipedes in Naked Lunch); Adrenochrome (a human-sourced stimulant in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas); neuroin (an inhaled opioid featured in Minority Report); Beijing cocktail (a fatal adrenaline blocker in Crank); and POS-51 (a drug in The 51st State claimed to be 51 times as potent as other drugs but is actually, spoiler alert, a placebo).

Sometimes, these synthesised substances encountered reality. During the 2010s, mephedrone was sold in some legal high shops as “Clockwork Orange” – with poster-inspired packaging. Adrenochrome has been co-opted by the QAnon conspiracy movement, who claim it’s an actual anti-ageing compound being harvested from children by the global elite.

With designer drug distribution currently at an all-time high in the real world, expect a new wave of film-makers to explore what’s coming up in the near future. As Naked Lunch’s William Lee darkly notes, there are “addicts of drugs not yet synthesised” waiting to be explored in fiction, taking us on new trips from the comfort of our cinema seat; and leaving us wondering what the hell was in our popcorn.

If Kris Kristofferson had never sung a single note, he would still have been remembered as a terrific screen actor in the Hollywood tradition of tough frontier masculinity, a movie star who worked with Scorsese, Peckinpah, Cimino and Sayles. He had a natural, unforced charisma in the rugged, take-it-or-leave-it tradition of Robert Ryan or John Wayne, or the newer style of Jeff Bridges and Sam Elliott.

Actually, without his recording career, he might have made it higher in the pantheon of screen legends, and his movie work was perhaps one of the casualties of Michael Cimino’s colossal folie de grandeur epic Heaven’s Gate from 1980, which damaged the prestige of everyone involved – Kristofferson was cast, or even miscast, a little against type as a Harvard man and member of the American overclass, who gallantly takes the side of immigrant homesteaders against the cruel cattle barons. It would have been interesting to see him to swap roles with Christopher Walken who was the barons’ hired gun – although Kristofferson made sense of the role’s need for granite integrity.

His face had a naturally Mount Rushmore-type impassive quality and he moved with an unhurried ranginess, the kind of walk which is designed to have a gun belt slung diagonally across the hips, although Kristofferson was never the cliched western archetype, and his speaking voice was the rumbling, compelling equivalent of his singing. He worked with Sam Peckinpah on three films, although maybe his most Peckinpah-type of character, one which he had had to grow into, was the notoriously violent and racist sheriff Charlie Wade, seen in flashback in John Sayles’ 1996 western crime drama Lone Star. His face had a natural reserve, even enigma, a guy who isn’t going to lay himself out there and ask for favours (with Kristofferson, you think of Ronald Reagan’s dictum “If you’re explaining, you’re losing”) but with a tiny half-smile could suggest menace and imminent violence.

In his undemonstrative way, Kristofferson was as much a lover as a fighter on screen – although the template was set with his role in Martin Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore from 1974: he was never precisely the boyish romantic. Ellen Burstyn is the widowed single mother and wannabe singer in retreat from the perils of life; she comes across Kristofferson’s divorced guy in a diner who becomes a kind of husband and stepfather, but rough and weather-beaten, with plenty of flaws and no illusions. An unusual variant on this was the British-set movie The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea from 1976, based on the Mishima novel in which Kristofferson is the sailor in the merchant navy who charms Sarah Miles and upsets her son – again, he is independent and freewheeling, with a very complicated attitude to the whole idea of settling down, despite his obvious plausibility as old-school breadwinner and protector.

In Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid in 1973, his Billy the Kid faces off against Garrett, played by James Coburn – another great strong-silent exemplar, although unusually Kristofferson is clean-shaven here, revealing something oddly cherubic in his face. But there was nothing cherubic about his appearance in Peckinpah’s Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia a year later, playing the fully bearded and fully violent biker-killer and enthusiastic participant in Peckinpah’s characteristically choreographed brutality.

For Peckinpah’s Convoy (1978), based on the hit single and the short-lived craze for CB radio, Kristofferson was the good guy, the neo-cowboy trucker (and lover) whose freedom on the open roads is threatened by corrupt law enforcement. It was a counterculture role, in its proto-Maga way, rather like his weed-selling musician in Cisco Pike (1971) being harassed by Gene Hackman’s cop.

Perhaps Kristofferson reached, or should have reached, a kind of screen apotheosis in the sensational box-office smash A Star Is Born from 1976, in which Kristofferson plays the established rock star who mentors and falls in love with a sensationally talented singer, played by Barbra Streisand, whose career goes stratospheric just as his plummets. The poster showed their two faces in a steamy Joy-of-Sex type clinch, but it’s debatable as to how convincingly Kristofferson could be as the embarrassingly wounded and downwardly-mobile loser. Could he fully commit to the darker aspects of the role embraced by the other actors who played it, like James Mason opposite Judy Garland in 1954 or Bradley Cooper opposite Lady Gaga in 2018? Well, Cooper’s gravelly, slow-talking performance was obviously very much indebted to Kristofferson and perhaps Kristofferson didn’t need to emote: merely being there and coming off second best to Barbra Streisand – a performer with no intention of being upstaged by her alpha male co-star – was spectacle enough.

Kristofferson was a performer who put the heady flavour of whisky and chewing tobacco into the movies: he was always the real deal.

When Andrea Arnold imagined the opening shots of her film of Wuthering Heights, she saw heavy mists ­swirling around the outline of a misshapen creature as it scaled a hillside. The figure would slowly be revealed as a climbing man, his back laden with dead rabbits for skinning.

On the day of the shoot, however, it was bright and sunny – and there were only three rabbits. “People keep saying one day I will come to like it,” she said later of her 2011 screen version. “It was a difficult experience making it, for various reasons. I find it hard to look at it.”

Arnold is not alone in feeling outwitted by Emily Brontë’s stirring 1847 novel. Wuthering Heights does that to directors. It is a gothic story that roams so wildly in the minds of readers that putting it out into the real world can seem diminishing, or even crass. It is not just the ferocity of the storytelling required, or the tricky handling of supernatural forces, but the central relationship itself. For modern film-makers, the question has become whether this violent narrative is now too dark to deal with, and whether its bullying romantic lead, Heathcliff, is too hot to handle.

Nevertheless the director, actor and writer Emerald Fennell, fresh from for her popular success with Saltburn, announced last week that she is to invent her own brooding Heathcliff and headstrong Catherine Earnshaw for the big screen.

Already Fennell – familiar to audiences for playing the young Camilla Parker Bowles in The Crown – is in trouble with some fans of the book. The Brontë chatrooms lit up when she revealed that she had cast the dashing Jacob Elordi, Saltburn’s ill-fated young buck, in the part of Heathcliff, and the Australian actor Margot Robbie as Catherine.

Many complained that Robbie, who has lately stalked the globe as Barbie, is not right to play the raven-haired teenager of the book and that Elordi is too conventionally good-looking for Heathcliff. Some were also angry that he is not the right ethnicity to play a character described in the book as “a dark-skinned Gypsy” who looks like a “lascar” (a slang term for a south Asian sailor), “or an American or Spanish castaway”.

“Did anyone actually read the book before deciding this?” queried the Independent’s film critic on hearing the news.

A decade ago, Arnold dodged these accusations of “white-washing” by casting the first non-white actor, James Howson, in the role. In contrast, screenwriter Peter Bowker, who wrote his TV film of the book in 2009, felt the term “Gypsy” was more likely a 19th-century stereotype for an outsider, rather than being meant as a literal characteristic. “There was certainly a growing fear of the ‘other’ in Victorian England and a number of urban myths about ‘cuckoos in the nest’ – strays or orphans that were brought into the family who then consumed it,” he said.

The Brontë expert Sharon Wright is actively enjoying the new fuss. “I think it is brilliant that people are still talking about this book – and with as much intensity as they were 200 yeas ago. Reviewers back then attacked its ‘brutal cruelty and unnatural love’ and looked down on its ‘vulgar depravity’. Poor Emily never saw a good review.”

Wright’s own new book, The Brontës in Bricks and Mortar, about the buildings described in the novels written by Emily and her two literary sisters Charlotte and Anne, comes out next year and was written together with Ann Dinsdale, who works at the trust now run from the three sisters’ former parsonage home in Haworth.

The characters in Wuthering Heights, Wright believes, will always be much harder to represent on film than the houses Brontë described or the wind-blown Yorkshire landscape: “Heathcliff really is a creation that lives only in the reader’s mind’s eye. Brontë is deliberately ambiguous about him.”

But Heathcliff is unlikely to be Fennell’s only problem. She will also need to decide how much of the rain-lashed saga to tell. Several earlier screen versions cut off the story before it gets too self-reflective. But, as Bowker admitted after his version was released, no matter how bravely you take a scythe to the lengthy text, there are certain key lines that a film-maker ought not to sidestep. “At first I thought this is going to be such an easy gig, because the language is so wonderful,” he told fans of the novel. “But then I started writing it out and realised very little of it works as dialogue because it is so heightened and poetic. So I wanted to preserve some of that quality, and there are classic lines, such as Cathy’s ‘I am Heathcliff’, which really you cannot lose.” Only Wolf Hall director Peter Kosminsky’s 1992 version, starring Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche, gets credit from Brontë enthusiasts for telling the whole unruly tale.

The tragedy of Wuthering Heights, for those still wondering what Kate Bush has been singing about all this time, revolves around the bootless love between Catherine and her Heathcliff, an adopted orphan boy found starving on the streets of Liverpool. The destructive relationship between these two, who find no way to express or fulfil their yearnings, is its gloomy core. For Bowker the point of the story was this “impossible passion”. “I don’t know my Freud well enough to speculate,” he said, “but there is something very fixed and unchanging about their passion which is both entrancing and terrifying.”

Perhaps the most glamorous portrayal of these central lovers is a black-and-white 1939 screen version. A tousle-haired young Laurence Olivier plays the wayward Heathcliff and the striking Hollywood pin-up Merle Oberon is Cathy. While it does have its longueurs, this film is probably the reason that a string of other film-makers have repeatedly hoped to rise to the challenge. It created a turbulent visual template that is hard to forget, even for those who do not know the book.

The other screen outing on the wild and windy moor that remains popular with audiences today is one that starred a pre-007 Timothy Dalton as Heathcliff and Anna Calder-Marshall as Cathy. Made in 1970, it was a box-office success and still has ardent admirers, although it also stops halfway through the original plot and leaves out two pivotal scenes: first, the devastating moment when Heathcliff overhears Cathy dismissing him, and then her later ghostly manifestation at his window.

An uncomplicated pleasure of Brontë’s enduring love story is the clever character names she chose. “Heathcliff” is so evocative, as is the name of the home that gives the book its title. And the three Brontë sisters had reason to understand the importance of a name. Not only is Charlotte’s plain Jane Eyre the perfect foil to her roistering Mr Rochester, but the authors themselves had to invent male names for themselves to avoid embarrassing their family and to pass muster in the wider world of publishing. So Charlotte temporarily became Currer Bell, Anne was Acton Bell and Emily, Ellis Bell.

Wright is also someone who recognises the value of using the right name. Last week she celebrated the success of her campaign to get the spelling of the Brontës’ surname corrected in Westminster Abbey, where a wall plaque in Poets’ Corner commemorates the three writers’ lives. Their surnames had been carved in stone without the two dots over the “e”, known as a diaeresis, that denote the emphasis they placed on the final vowel.

Contemplating the amended memorial this weekend, Wright is sure of one thing: “I do think Emily would be absolutely delighted that we are still trying to figure out Heathcliff. We all have our own vision in our heads and I am really looking forward to seeing Emerald Fennell’s.”

As I read the various drafts of Julian Fellowes’ pilot script for Downton Abbey, it was not lost on me that his new invention of the dowager countess (as yet uncast) bore some similarity to Lady Trentham in Robert Altman’s film Gosford Park.

That movie was a precursor to Downton in many different ways. My original pitch to Fellowes had been to expand on the premise of Gosford and reconceive it as a weekly episodic show. When it looked as though ITV were actually going to greenlight the series, our attention turned to casting.

Almost the entire cast came in to audition before being offered the part, but there was no question of asking Maggie to come and meet or deliver some lines for us – that would have been impertinent and inappropriate.

The role of Violet Grantham was certainly not designed for Maggie – she had never done a long-running episodic TV series, so I had little prospect of being able to get her. But once on the page, it did become very clear that it was her, and we had to try our best to secure her. For reasons I cannot quite remember, she agreed.

I think, like me, she knew Fellowes was the best illustrator of this rarefied world and that they could do good work together. In the end, her contribution to Downton Abbey is immeasurable and the show would not have been the huge global hit it became without her.

At the read-through, she greeted me warmly, because this was not our first time at the rodeo. By complete coincidence, I had gone to school with her sons, Chris and Toby. Chris and I were contemporaries, Toby a couple of years younger. Chris and I started work together at the Chichester Festival theatre the day after we left school. We did our best to build sets for the then studio theatre – a marquee. Those sets all fell apart. But it was a start, and we loved it.

We loved her performance because she found the truth of the character and was never ashamed to deliver those barbed lines, in spite of how archaic or antediluvian they may have sounded. Of many aphorisms and “zingers”, everyone recalls the rather brilliant “What is a weekend”, yet she brought the house down with less-remembered bons mots such as her rejections of Lady Sybil’s claim that she was political: “No. She isn’t until she is married, then her husband will tell her what her opinions are.”

She wasn’t remotely like Violet – other than being a woman who was devoted to her family. But she understood Violet. When you work on a script, a character is merely words on a page and just an idea, a template for what it could be. Only once we saw the scenes she played to perfection could we see one of our greatest screen characters come to life.

A favourite scene? When the dowager arrives at the abbey on hearing the news of her granddaughter’s death. As always, she had the steely presence, but for once there was a chink in the armour as she put her arm on the wall to stabilise herself, knowing that she might in fact break at any moment.

She famously did not suffer fools. In an earlier film in the 1990s, I made the mistake of scheduling a very light first day without dialogue. On the second morning, she strolled past me, muttering entirely for my benefit: “All they’ve got me doing on this show is walking up and down bloody corridors.” She could be an intimidating presence for everyone, yet I can attest that the entire cast and crew of Downton, across six seasons and two movies, was honoured to work with this hugely consequential star of stage and screen.

She was particularly close to the actors who played the other members of the family. But I always detected the admiration for the other actors in the company she held in high esteem, such as Jim Carter and Phyllis Logan. Most of all, I remember her huge generosity and affection for the three young actors who played her granddaughters. She loved all her scenes with Michelle Dockery, Laura Carmichael and Jessica Brown Findlay, revelling in seeing them take flight at an earlier stage of their careers.

The last Downton film involved the death of the dowager countess and will now be particularly poignant for her Downton friends and family. I am so pleased we conceived of a proper ending for such a remarkable screen character. When she left the set for the final time, the cast and crew lined up outside the abbey and applauded her as she was swept away into her car, privileged to have witnessed this brilliant screen character brought to life by this supremely talented, yet private person.

You have done more than almost any man alive to promote female‑led comedy. What has made this so close to your heart? Oroklini
I love funny women. I was an only child. I was close to my mom, who was very funny. I lived next door to a family of eight kids, six of whom were girls. Most of my friends were either girls or super-nerdy guys. When I got to Hollywood, I started hanging out with these funny women that I knew from when I was a standup comedian. When I went to see their movies, they just played the mean girlfriend. I thought: I don’t like this balance. I relate more to stories of funny women because they tend to be less aggressive and toxic. I was bullied so much as a kid that I would run to the girls for solace.

Do you believe comedy can still be laugh-out-loud funny with so many restrictions on what is and is not allowed, or do you believe that the muzzling of many topics restricts the scene? Sudikko
I’m not in the school of thought that political correctness has killed comedy. My only goal is to make people laugh and hopefully not offend anybody in the process. What offends people is making fun of things people can’t change, like their physical appearance, their race, their gender. But if you are just making jokes about extreme characters and the human condition, you can get away with a lot of stuff.

Considering the success of the US Office [Feig produced and directed 14 episodes], have you ever thought of taking another Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant idea, Extras, and making a US version with entrants such as Meryl Streep, Melissa McCarthy and John Cena? teabags12
It’s actually a really good idea to do an American version. The problem is, in America, it’s hard to do projects about showbiz because it’s hard for audiences not to root for the main character. Americans don’t like making fun of lead characters. That’s the biggest difference I’ve found between British and American comedy. Ricky Gervais’s Office is so funny because his character is really unlikable. British audiences enjoy taking the piss out of pompous lead characters who are not lovable. He’s an idiot because he doesn’t realise he’s offending people because he thinks he’s being funny. We soon realised that we had to make Steve Carell less mean-spirited. The first episode I directed was Office Olympics [season two, episode three], where he gets so upset that people went: “Oh, he does have a heart.”

You’re a well-dressed guy. Who’s doing the best men’s fashion right now? LABeachGuy
Men’s fashion is all over the place. Suiting is coming back. People are stepping up with jackets and we’re getting away from hypercasuals. There’s a lot of streetwear, which is always very popular. I definitely see people bringing more individual style. Am I always this immaculately turned out? Always! I’ll wear jeans with a sports coat or a nice leather jacket, but I do love a good suit. I get a lot of my suits from Anderson & Sheppard on Savile Row, but I also wear a lot of Ralph Lauren.

What’s your advice for a comedy writer trying to break into the industry? TheMikeDee
Write about situations and relationships you’ve been in, insecurities you’ve had, but put them in a bigger setting. If you went through a crazy relationship, put it in a dystopian sci-fi epic so that you’ve got more than just the actual things that inspired you. You then have those characters in an extreme situation and it’s the reacting that creates the comedy.

Jokes don’t necessarily get laughs because audiences are very aware when they’re being told a joke. I think it comes from YouTube, where we watch real people reacting to real events. If you have written comedy that feels silly, the audience don’t like it. That’s why The Office is so good, because it’s a behavioural comedy. There are tons of jokes in it, but they’re all sold very behaviourally.

What made you think Jason Statham would be so funny in Spy? PaulMariner
Crank and Crank 2. Those movies are bananas. I’m a huge Statham fan. I’ve seen every movie he’s ever done. I love him to death, but I always thought: I wonder if he could be funny. When you see Crank, you think: there’s no way that guy does not know this movie’s absurd. I thought: if he can go that nuts in a movie, he’s got to have a good sense of humour.

I had him come in to read some lines, just to see how they were playing. He said: “Should I play this funny?” I said: “Jason, if you’re going to try to be wacky, then I’m just going to tell you not to. You have to play this like the most serious movie you’ve ever done. And then it’s funny.”

Why did you make 2016’s Ghostbusters [starring McCarthy, Kristen Wiig, Kate McKinnon and Leslie Jones] a full-blown reboot that ignored the original films? Bengis
Bill [Murray] had publicly said he didn’t want to do another Ghostbusters at that point. Harold Ramis had died. Dan [Aykroyd] and Ernie [Hudson] were there, but half the team felt weird. It had been 30 years and Bill and the gang were so iconic; I didn’t want to do anything that hurt the original movies.

The political climate of the time was really weird, with Hillary Clinton running for office in 2016. There were a lot of dudes looking for a fight. When I was getting piled on, on Twitter, I’d go back and see who they were. So many were Trump supporters. Then Trump came out against us. He was like: “They’re remaking Indiana Jones without Harrison Ford. You can’t do that. And now they’re making Ghostbusters with only women. What’s going on?” and got all upset. Everybody went fucking cannibal. It turned the movie into a political statement, as if to say: “If you’re pro-women, you’re going to go see this. If you’re not, then …” I didn’t think it mattered at all that the main characters were women, but people brought a lot of baggage.