Profile interview: Tamsin Egerton (The List, Issue 657)

Born
26 November 1988, Hampshire, England

Background
Having followed her older sister to a BBC audition at their local youth theatre as a child, Egerton started to get TV parts immediately, traveling the world for various productions before she had turned 15. She bagged her first movie role in 2005 in British comedy Keeping Mum, after which her head-turning looks kept the ‘stunning blonde’ roles coming, including teen sexpot Chelsea in the recent St Trinian’s remakes.

What’s she up to now?

Starring in Noel Clarke’s multi-stranded action caper 4.3.2.1 as Cassandra, the naïve rich-girl who travels to New York for a web-organised blind date that goes horrifically wrong. Egerton features in the film’s most bizarre scene, when cult American director Kevin Smith pops up as a fellow passenger on her flight.

On Cassandra
‘She’s not grown up on an estate and seen friends lose their virginity at 13; she’s naive and innocent. That’s what drew me to her, because I’m known for promiscuous Chelsea, whereas this character is not all about guys, she hasn’t lost it, she covets it and she falls in love.’

On doing nude scenes
‘I would never do an American Pie and “get my tits out” for no reason, because it’s grotesque, it’s unnecessary. But for my storyline you need the nudity, because you need to feel uncomfortable in the scene. It was very awkward, but that’s what it’s meant to be. I think, being a girl, it’s hard [to avoid]. Guys get to play with guns and we get to be in our lingerie.’

On acting with Kevin Smith
‘He was a bundle of energy, and very sweet, but he got really personal really quickly! He was asking about my sex life after five minutes of meeting, and I was like ‘erm, Kevin?’ while he’s saying ‘well me and my lady ...’ and I’m like ‘no, this is so weird!’’

Interesting fact
Egerton was in the final audition to play the 9-year old Joan of Arc in Luc Besson’s 1999 film The Messenger.

Read my review of 4.3.2.1

4.3.2.1 is general release from 2 June. This interview first published in The List magazine.

4.3.2.1 (The List, Issue 657)

The shadow of Quentin Tarantino looms large over Noel ‘Adulthood’ Clarke’s ambitious second film, in which four girls (Emma Roberts, Tamsin Egerton, Ophelia Lovibond and Shanika Warren-Markland) have the weekend from hell. Clarke and his co-director Mark Davis aim admirably high, pushing against British drama traditions, telling interconnected stories with a cast of oddball characters spouting quirky dialogue via a narrative that playfully keeps reality at arms length. But while the resulting mash-up of conflicting tones and styles is entertaining and features moments of bizarre inspiration, 4.3.2.1 is ultimately less than the sum of its parts.

The set-up is promising – the girls’ parallel stories play out one after another, with the film rewinding to the same initial point after each one – but Clarke’s script is undisciplined, overflowing with ideas and not focused into a coherent and meaningful whole. A constant stream of attention-grabbing cameos adds to the patched-together feel, and the more dramatic story elements aren’t developed enough to hold much weight. The four actresses are great though, and their strong performances do a lot to carry the film through its weaker moments. Ophelia Lovibond (pictured) is particularly impressive.

3/5

4.3.2.1 is released on 2nd June. This review first published in The List magazine.

Profile: Matt Harlock & Paul Thomas (The List, Issue 656)

Background 

Having individually produced various shorts and television features, Paul and Matt joined forces for their feature debut American: The Bill Hicks Story, an innovative documentary combining animated photos with interviews and stand-up clips to tell the story of the late great comedian.

On Bill Hicks’s comedy
Matt: ‘[He could] turn a subject on its head in a very short space of time, and distill something which you’d seen as a very big, complex issue so you take away this new understanding. He had really good dick jokes as well.’

On being the ones to tell Hicks’ story
Matt: ‘I had some contact with Bill’s family, because I’d been doing events in London, where we were showing his material, and there seemed to be a lot of footage that I just hadn’t seen. Paul and I started talking about whether we might be able to make it into a new telling of Bill’s story.’
Paul: ‘Hicks is getting pitched all the time, so we needed to come up with a different approach, and it was this device of animated photos – we knew that there was a huge photo archive, and that there was potential in that. So we did some tests and boom, channels jumped straight at it.’

On putting the film together 
Matt: ‘The first time that we watched the assembly of Bill’s life, onstage, in chronological order, it was a really moving experience, watching him go from 16 to a very ill person at the age of 32. That powerful reaction was something that we felt was worth maintaining, and that’s where the chronological approach came from.’
Paul: ‘The first half really builds the idea of who this guy is [through] his friends and his family. Thirteen years had passed when we did the interviews, but the vividness and the clarity of the recollections were astonishing. Then [the stand-up clips] had to reveal Bill the person at the same time as the comedy. That’s where the second half really took on a power.’

On the role of the film

Paul: ‘He should be somebody that everybody knows. He is a key cultural cornerstone.’

American: The Bill Hicks Story, selected release, Fri 14 May. This article first published in The List magazine.

Robin Hood (futuremovies.co.uk)

Ridley Scott’s timing couldn’t be better. In a week that’s seen a new Prime Minister assuming power thanks to a political system that has failed its people, it’s strangely appropriate to be reminded of England’s most famous outlaw. From the film’s opening scrawl citing a ‘time when kings were tyrants’ to the story’s central theme of individual liberty and the importance of rulers listening to their people, Scott’s take on the legendary figure offers plenty of moments to provoke chuckles of contemporary recognition, and perhaps even hopes that we had our own Robin Hood in action today.

But whether we would want this Robin Hood, or Robin Longstride, as he is renamed here, is debatable. The trailer promised a version of the story that we’d never been told before, and Scott and writer Brian Helgeland make good on that claim; this story ends where most previous tellings have begun, with Robin declared an outlaw and hiding out in Sherwood Forest. But Scott’s film also inadvertently makes plain why this part of Robin’s life is usually confined to backstory; it’s not that interesting, and Robin himself doesn’t actually do much in it. We’re used to seeing Robin Hood as a decisive leader of men and a dashing romantic hero, but here he is redrawn as a man carried along by the tides of circumstance, a small pawn in a much bigger political game.

This may well be a truer historical depiction of the real Robin Hood, if there ever was one, but it’s not the stuff of enduring cinema. For all his drawling Americanisms, Kevin Costner’s version of Robin, in 1991’s great fun Prince of Thieves, earned his place in movie history by firing that flaming arrow in slow-motion and making that heroic roof-top dive through a stained-glass window. The Robin that we meet here (Russell Crowe, excellent as always) has none of that heroism or heart. That’s intentional of course; Scott is trying to show us what made Robin change from a man living only for himself to a man willing to live and die for his woman and his people. The problem is that, in the larger historical context that Scott offers, Robin’s story just doesn’t seem like such a big deal.

Unsurprisingly, it’s in creating that larger context that Scott really succeeds, because he is a truly great film director, and given a big enough canvas he can bring a whole world to life. He has that canvas in 12th Century England, and he establishes the world with the same structure as he did in Gladiator; a huge, brilliantly depicted battle, followed by a mass of scenes that set up the fraught political situation in the country and skilfully introduce us to all the story’s main characters. There’s a lot of drama and intrigue to enjoy, and a host of great actors, including a fantastic Max von Sydow, playing it out. 

Ultimately though, all this compelling background can’t make up for the gaping hole at the centre of the movie. Robin is a bystander in his own film: both Matthew Macfadyen’s Sheriff of Nottingham and Mark Strong’s villainous Godfrey are hardly aware of Robin’s existence, giving him no great enemy to conflict with, while his courtship with Marion (Cate Blanchett) is forced – literally – and fledgling, giving him no passionate romance to pursue. In their efforts to do something new and different with the Robin Hood character, Scott and his merry band of filmmakers have robbed him of everything that made him great.

6/10

Robin Hood is out now. This review first published on futuremovies.co.uk.

Lebanon (futuremovies.co.uk)

After a few brief credits, Lebanon begins with a porthole opening and a soldier climbing into a tank. We’re watching from inside, along with the three other young and inexperienced men that make up the crew. Apart from one notable exterior shot, our perspective will be limited to what can be seen and heard from within this tank for the duration of the film. From this simple and restricted set-up, Samuel Maoz, who nearly 30 years ago was a gunner in an Israeli tank just like this one, builds a compelling, intense and surprisingly layered film experience.

If the prospect of being stuck for 90 minutes in a tank with four guys, none of them particularly conversational or charismatic, doesn’t have you beating a path to the nearest cinema you’re certainly not alone, but this is a film that is worth the effort; it rewards investment. Maoz doesn’t use this limited perspective as a gimmick or a merely interesting concept, but rather he uses it to build a very effective case against war as a reasonable human endeavour. From this perspective, it is difficult to see how any war can have any result other than disaster.

The film begins at nighttime, and text on the screen tells us it is 1982, the first day of the first Lebanon war. This is all the information we get, and it soon becomes shockingly clear that this is pretty much all the information that anyone on the front lines of this army has. A commanding officer comes into the tank with a seemingly clear set of orders, but as soon as an engagement begins, and we see glimpses of the chaotic conflict through the terrified gunner’s crosshairs, it is intensely apparent that there is no plan, just people being killed.

Maoz structures the film episodically, subtly shifting his focus around each of the four men to gradually add layers of development and place us firmly in each moment, provoking us to think and feel at all times. Perhaps it’s not surprising that the most powerful moment comes through the eyes of the gunner, as he watches a distraught Lebanese woman step out of a burning building that he has just reluctantly pulled the trigger to destroy. We are watching through the same crosshairs, strongly feeling the powerless rage of injustice on both sides of the gun.

The fact that Maoz gives virtually no context is both a strength and a weakness; it allows his film to be about war in general, and means that an audience with no prior knowledge of the Lebanon war can immediately grasp the issues being addressed. By the same token this approach leaves Maoz open to criticism, as his film doesn’t actually shed any light on the wider political reasons for this fight, arguments that remain unresolved today.

With its confined location and small cast the film feels at times like a play, and this feeling is borne out in Maoz’s dialogue; when characters speak there is meaningful weight to their words. Equally significant are the recurring extreme close-ups of the tank’s various dials and metal surfaces, which crumble along with the minds of the men the deeper they become entrenched in chaos. Maoz’s skill in marrying technical and compositional skill to thematic intentions belies his film’s micro-budget, and Lebanon is arguably as insightful a portrayal of men in war as the considerably more costly Oscar-winner The Hurt Locker. This film is a significant anti-war statement, and one that deserves your time and attention.

8/10

Lebanon is on limited release from 14th May. This review first published on FutureMovies.co.uk.