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A redblog Q&A with Pirate Radio Star Tom Sturridge

Earlier this week, I and others sat down for a short talk with 23-year-old British actor Tom Sturridge, who plays the central character in Pirate Radio, opening this weekend. Though he grew up around show business, Sturridge has so far only appeared in a handful of films, including 2004's Being Juilia and Vanity Fair.

Written and directed by Richard Curtis (Love Actually) and originally known as The Boat That Rocked when it was released last spring in Britain, Pirate Radio tells a fictional story based on the real-life outlaw disc jockeys who quasi-legally broadcast rock and roll radio to England in the late 1960s from ships anchored in the North Sea. The rag-tag DJ crew is led by Curtis regular Bill Nighy as the owner and ship’s captain; Phillip Seymour Hoffman as The Count, the station’s sole American voice and most passionate believer in the power of rock; and Rhys Ifans as the preening Jagger-esque hedonist Gavin. Introduced into the middle of all this floating summer of love madness is Young Carl, played by Sturridge. 

(You can read my  Q&A with Pirate Radio director Richard Curtis here.)

The following are some highlights from our chat with Sturridge:

On Being the Child of Filmmaker Charles Sturridge and Actress Phoebe Nicholls

Sturridge: In a weird way, it was kind of the opposite of a show-business childhood. I was a very clichéd, rebellious child, and I really didn’t want to have anything to do with what they did. I didn’t see my mom in a play until about a year and a half ago for the first time. There was no sort of fracture on any side of our relationships, but I wasn’t somebody who spent time on sets. I did a film when I was seven, Gulliver’s Travels directed by my dad, which was more due to the fact that he was out of the country and wanted a way for his son to be with him and so he put me in it. I wouldn’t really call that acting, I’d call it standing.

And so it wasn’t until when I was 17, when they were casting Being Julia that I got involved in the business. I was quite a big cinephile when I was a kid, and I really wanted to meet the film’s director, Istvan Szabo. And the casting director was my friend’s mother and she kinda showed him all the professional 17-year-old actors, and he didn’t like any of them. So after that the only other 17-year-old boys she knew were her family friends. And so she started getting them in, and I really wanted to meet Istvan. It was that experience meeting him and by chance getting the job and the experience of making the film that got me into acting more than anything.

On How Twenty-Somethings Today Feel About the Sixties

Sturridge: I think every contemporary band and musician has in some way been influenced or is referencing music that began in the ‘60s in the same way that the Stones were referencing the blues. It’s not an alien idea, this music—unlike any other period, it still abounds in our culture: Beatles music, Rolling Stones music, The Who, especially in England. You can’t watch a film or a TV advert or a television program without listening to them.

My dad gave me his record collection when I was younger, so I was very familiar with the music. The story itself, the idea of pirate radio and what was happening on these boats, I was completely ignorant of, and learned about when I read the script. But in England, it’s so pervasive, this music, that you can’t not know it. Richard Curtis has a kind of encyclopedic knowledge of pop music from 1956 to the present day so it was an education because he would bring out weird B sides everyday that no one had ever heard of.

What’s amazing about it, I think, which is very different from being young now, is how the music of the ‘60s was born of an energy created by this postwar conservatism, and young people not having a framework to express how they feel. Especially in England, the ‘50s were very, very repressed; people were recovering from what had happened in World War II. You didn’t tell your mother what you felt about love and sex and how to live, and so this kind of energy built up that exploded with this music, and I think that’s something that any young person can empathize with.

A redblog Q&A with Pirate Radio and Love Actually Writer-Director Richard Curtis

Earlier this week, I and others sat down for a short round-table conversion with Richard Curtis, the writer-director of Pirate Radio, opening this weekend. Curtis is the writer of Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill, Bridget Jones’s Diary, and the writer-director of my number-one rom-com of all time, 2003's Love Actually. (In the '80s, he also helped create one of my favorite British comedies, the twisted historical Blackadder series starring Rowan Atkinson.)

Originally known as The Boat That Rocked when it was released last spring in Britain, Pirate Radio tells a fictional story based on the real-life outlaw disc jockeys who quasi-legally broadcast rock and roll radio to England in the late 1960s from ships anchored in the North Sea. The rag-tag DJ crew is led by Curtis regular Bill Nighy as the owner and ship’s captain; Phillip Seymour Hoffman as The Count, the station’s sole American voice and most passionate believer in the power of rock; and Rhys Ifans as the preening Jagger-esque hedonist Gavin.

Other familiar comic faces in Pirate Radio include Nick Frost (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz) as a “chunky” (and gloriously hairy) ladies man, and Rhys Darby, best known as the Flight of the Conchord’s manager Murray. Kenneth Branagh plays a British government official trying to shut the pirate radio stations down, and Mad Men's January Jones shows up as a dazzling love interest. Introduced into all this floating summer of love madness is Young Carl, played by Tom Sturridge. (A Q&A with Sturridge will be published tomorrow.)

The following are some of the highlights from our chat with Curtis:

On Youth and Music, and the Freedom to Live with People You Hate

Curtis: England was hilarious in the ‘60s. I went to a boarding school and it really was like 1949. All the hair was unbelievably short, you couldn’t run in the corridors, you couldn’t talk after lights out, you sung endless hymns with the word “pilgrim” in them. And that’s why it was so fantastic to listen to rock ‘n’ roll—it was undisciplined.

I had a tiny little radio, and you were like a safe cracker, turning the dial—they were hard to get, these stations because they only had very small frequencies. And it was the thing about volume level as you listened. It was too quiet you couldn’t hear it, but if it was too loud the matron who would stalk along the corridors could hear it, so you had to get that perfect level.

I’ve got very passionate memories of “Reach Out I’ll Be There” by the Four Tops. It was the first single I bought, and you know the way you can remember weird moments from your youth? I remember chapel was compulsory and a guy and I were hiding in the music rehearsal room and remember the DJ saying that "I’ll be There" had gone from 16 to number two, and how unbelievably excited I was. I was locked in a boarding school and sort of sensed this amazing world of freedom.

Also I think Pirate Radio is actually a film partly about being 24. At that age, most people end up in a flat with too many people, one of whom has had sex with everybody, one of whom has never had sex…with dreadful food, bad hygiene, and listening to music all the time. For me that was Camden Town, 1979: The Specials, Madness, Blondie, The Pretenders. And in a way it’s a movie about that nostalgic thing, about the freedom of our 20s when money doesn’t matter, you do the job you want to do, you don’t have any children. The weird thing is you often end up living with people you don’t like, ‘cause it’s a bit random. It’s the one person who can afford to live there, or the guy who owns the place, it’s some girl who’s a friend of his mother’s who has to move in. I hated the four people I lived with, but we were happy.

Christmas in July, Free of Snow and Humbug:The Christmas Carol Train Tour and Footage Screening

It may seem a ways off from late July, but this holiday season brings Robert Zemeckis's motion-captured CGI adaptation of A Christmas Carol starring Jim Carrey. So last weekend, Disney and Amtrak brought their rolling Christmas Carol Super-Duper-Dickens Train to Chicago as part of a 40-city promotional tour between now and the opening of the film in early November.

As you can imagine, I’m normally allergic to PR pushes. And while I have been a loyal Amtrak rider for more than a decade now, I couldn’t see getting all excited over a special “Christmas Carol” train. In July. At 7 am on a Friday morning.

But, I am a huge fan of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol—not the many film versions, but the book itself. It’s become a holiday tradition for me that on years when I’m feeling particularly run-down, stressed-out, and generally misanthropic around the holidays (which, oddly, is most of them) I take some time just before Christmas day to sit down somewhere alone and re-read the original novella. And bawl like a baby. (If I don’t have time to re-read the book, I re-watch Scrooged—same result.)

I’m guessing that many of you share my trepidation about Jim Carrey as Scrooge. I don’t mind Carrey and actually respect his attempts over the years to do something other than just milk the rubber-faced funny-man shtick again and again (which is why I try to avoid stuff like Yes Man). But hearing he’s playing Scrooge only conjures up the image of a wacky Ebenezer doing nonstop manic voices, mugging, and slapstick.

Well, you gotta hand it to Disney PR blitzes: They work. Because after seeing about 15 minutes of the new 3D Christmas Carol, and touring the special theme train, I came away with not only my fears squelched, but my anticipation raised.

The footage we saw looks terrific—full of rich Victorian detail, both warm and cool tones, and hints that Zemeckis really is going for a faithful adaptation, complete with the ghostly creepiness that lurks within much of Dickens’ tale. Yes, there are also several bull-goose, roller-coaster action scenes added in, designed to keep the kids interested, but from what little I saw, they augment the original material, not diminish it.

And Carrey seemingly plays it completely straight. No mugging. No wacky voices. No manic leaps of silliness. This is not How the Grinch Stole a Christmas Carol. With Gary Oldman and Colin Frith at Carrey’s side (as Bob Cratchit and nephew Fred), this is much more in line with a Masterpiece Theater style reading of Dickens’ book, and that—plus the more entertaining and dazzling CGI adventure scenes—appears to be a good thing indeed.

Directors' Prep: Renny Harlin and Cutthroat Island

I'm kicking off a new occasional redblog feature, where we look at an interesting older film from a director with a new movie opening over the weekend.

I had hoped to get things going last week with Dark City, the 1998 dark (who knew!?) sci-fi mind bender from Knowing director Alex Proyas. Alas, I didn’t get to re-watch Dark City before Knowing was out, and frankly, after Knowing I’d had plenty of Proyas for the time being.

So this week’s target is Renny Harlin, director of the new release 12 Rounds (which Erika has already lambasted via its trailer.) Problem is, there isn’t such a thing as a really good Renny Harlin movie. In fact he is infamous for having directed the biggest box-office flop in history. So not so much with the good, but still plenty of interesting here.

You may or may not be familiar with Harlin’s oeuvre, but in the ‘90s he was the consummate action-film hack. After several films in his home country, the Finnish Phenom crept into our American cinematic consciousness in 1988 with A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master. (If you’re fuzzy on your Freddy-ology, it’s the one where the girl got turned into a giant cockroach… Franz Kafka spent the royalties on a Ferrari.)

But Harlin got his big break when he was tapped to helm the Die Hard sequel in 1990, Die Hard II: Still Dying. And what do you do after you’ve helped create a successful sequel to one of the biggest action films of the day? Make a comedy with Andrew “Dice” Clay, of course! (The Adventures of Ford Fairlane, out that same summer.) Harlin went on to make Cliffhanger with Stallone in 1993.

Later in his career Renny Harlin brought us the second greatest shark movie ever, The Deep Blue Sea—if by “great,” you mean delightfully cheesy. It features the greatest rally-the-troops speech ever given, as delivered by Sam The Man Jackson. Yes, Mr. Jackson has a pretty fantastic speech in Snakes on a Plane, but those of you who have seen Deep Blue Sea (it seems to play non-stop on basic cable), know what I’m talking about. Greatest. Speech. Ever.

But back in the mid-‘90s Harlin was the epitome of the Hollywood Action Stud Director. James Cameron may have been King, but he was about to go off for a few years to make some silly movie about a sinking ship. Michael Bay was still making music videos—Bad Boys and The Rock were several years off. Harlin, with his long blond Viking locks, could make any movie he wanted. And what he wanted to do was turn his then girlfriend Geena Davis from a sweet, comedic actress into Big Action Star (similar to what Cameron did for his gal, Linda Hamilton).

And how he wanted to do it was by having her star in an epic pirate movie called Cutthroat Island.

I'll Show You a Banking Crisis!

The highly anticipated full-length trailer for Johnny Depp and Christian Bale's Public Enemies was released today, and I think it looks pretty rockin'.  Depp plays notorious bank robber John Dillinger, and Bale is FBI agent Melvin Purvis (who's obviously trying to capture Dillinger and his fellow group of modern-day Merry Men). The film is based on Brian Burroughs' Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933–34 and was directed by Michael Mann (The Last of the Mohicans, Ali, Collateral).

Unfortunately, we are still four months away from its debut on July 1.

Some people are criticizing the use of contemporary music (the song featured is "Ten Million Slaves" by blues artist Otis Taylor) in a trailer for a 1930s crime drama, but I actually think that's what is especially cool about the preview.  Further, I loved the brief glimpse of Chicago's Biograph Theater (where Dillinger was famously shot down).  The theater still exists (I've seen a show there!) and was designated a Chicago Landmark in 2001.

I also got a kick out of the the film's poster... click the link below to see it after the jump.

Godzilla Was Here

Living in a city like Chicago where so many great films have been and continue to be shot (The Blues Brothers, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Batman Begins, The Dark Knight and the upcoming Time Traveler's Wife adaptation, to name a few), you might think that the last thing I'd want to do when away from home is scout out movie locations.  But you'd be very, very wrong.  In fact, in 2006 I went so far as to convince my husband to travel halfway around the world to New Zealand, simply to see where scenes from my favorite trilogy, The Lord of the Rings, took place.  (I'm still expecting my Ultimate Nerd Award to arrive any day now in the mail.)

More recently, I was thrilled to come across famous movie spots in both Hawaii and the Galapagos Islands.  At the end of October, I took a tour around Oahu that visited dozens of film locations.  Some of the highlights were:

Godzilla's footprints, from 1998's Godzilla starring Matthew Broderick 

The first two footprints (lower-left corner and right-of-center) used to be several feet deep, but have since been filled in for safety reasons.  The one I'm standing in remains as it originally was in the film. Sure, the movie was awful, but seeing its lasting contribution to Kualoa Ranch in Oahu was pretty cool.

More pictures after the jump...

Another Round of New Moon Rumors

If you haven't read any of Stephenie Meyer's books besides Twilight (or if you never read Twilight but intend to see all of the film adaptations of Meyer's saga), you may want to avoid the rest of this post. That's right, this is a Spoiler Alert!

OK, for those of you still with me, here are two new bits of information about the big-screen version of New Moon:

1) We learned a few days ago that Twilight director Catherine Hardwicke will not be at the helm of its sequel.  Summit Entertainment has since stated that it's hoping to release New Moon on November 20, 2009 (yep, less than one year from now...), which means that they have to get moving on the selection of Hardwicke's replacement.  The name on everyone's lips is Chris Weitz, who recently directed another novel adaptation, The Golden Compass.   

Unfortunately, this doesn't make me feel any better about the prospects for New Moon.  I read The Golden Compass and loved it, but the film version -- although it was visually stunning -- seemed hastily cut together; the storyline wasn't clear and the pacing was all wrong.  So I'm not sure how much better New Moon will be in comparison to Twilight, based on not only my opinion of Weitz's past work, but also on the fact that nearly half of the $50 million budget for the sequel will be going toward Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson's salaries.  That doesn't leave much cash to throw at special effects, huh?  Which leads us to...

2) The plot of New Moon revolves heavily around Bella's (Stewart) relationship with her Native American friend Jacob, who just so happens to be a werewolf. (Hence the importance of not scrimping on the FX budget -- there's a lot of human-werewolf transforming going on!)  In Twilight, Jacob was played by Taylor Lautner.  And while a lot of the girls in my theater snickered whenever he was on screen (they clearly didn't think Lautner was as cute as they had envisioned Jacob to be), I personally felt that once his hair was cut (as happens in the book) Lautner might be more believable as a romantic rival to Pattinson's Edward.  Apparently The Powers That Be at Summit don't feel the same way.  Word is that they're looking for a replacement for Lautner, as they don't believe he commands the presence necessary to carry much of the second installment of the franchise. 

With preproduction for New Moon scheduled to begin next Monday, December 15th (!), one thing is certain: there's bound to be a lot more New Moon drama before shooting begins in mid-March.  Let's hope the team at Summit makes the right decisions, or they will face the wrath of millions of Twihards!

But perhaps the real question is, does the studio even care about that wrath if they're positive that Twilight fans will still see the next movie no matter what?  Business is business.  They don't care 'bout no stinkin' love story, there's money to be made!

Feeling Full?

Regretting that extra plate of turkey and mashed potatoes?  Realizing you shouldn't have gone back for seconds of pumpkin pie?  Feeling not so light on your feet after spending all day yesterday in a food coma in front of the television?

Take solace.  At least it's not your job to pack on the pounds, right?

Each year when the holiday season kicks off and I inevitably notice that the ol' pants are feeling a bit snug, I make myself feel better by thinking about all of the celebrities that suffer for their craft by way of gaining a ton of weight for certain roles.  Sure, they're getting paid millions to do so, but I don't like to get bogged down with those details.  I just want the guilt of my sugar cookie binge to subside. 

So who helps to ease my mind?

- Reneé Zellweger, who infamously gained, lost, gained and then lost weight before and after the two Bridget Jones films

- George Clooney, who put on 40 pounds for Syriana and then suffered a back injury during filming, to boot

- Matt Damon, who got all pudgy for his role as a whistle-blower in March 2009's The Informant

- Jared Leto, who looked completely unrecognizable after his 65-pound weight gain for Chapter 27

- Fergie, who has already added 13 pounds to her Fergalicious frame for her stint in Nine

- Hilary Swank, who is being asked to gain 20 to 30 pounds for the adaptation of French Women Don't Get Fat

I could go on and on, but there's no need.  Surely I'm much better off than everyone on that list, right? 

In fact, I think I'm deserving of some left-overs...

It Really Is This Simple: If You Want to Laugh, See Role Models

I have to admit that I was a little nervous to read James' review of Role Models.  As you may remember, I attended a screening of this movie in mid-October, after which its star, Paul Rudd (who also co-wrote its script), held a Q&A session with the audience.  I wasn't sure if I enjoyed the movie so much simply because I got swept up in the excitement of seeing Rudd in person, or if Role Models really was THAT good.  So imagine my relief when I saw that James proclaimed it to be "the best comedy of the year."  My husband and I are actually considering seeing the movie again, not only because it was so hilarious, but also because the audience was laughing so hard throughout much of the film that we are positive we missed a lot of good lines.

For once, a trailer doesn't give away the best parts of the movie it's promoting:

Anyway, I promised last month that once Role Models debuted, I would write about any "behind-the-scenes" stories that Rudd shared at the screening.  So here you are...

I Could Barely Keep from Drooling at a Q&A Session with Paul Rudd

Last night I went to a screening of Role Models, which isn't out until November 7, so I will wait to post my review of the movie until its release date gets a bit closer. In the meantime, just know that it was one of the funniest comedies I have seen in a long, long time. 

What made it even better was that its writer and star, Paul Rudd, was in the theater with us!  He said a few words before the lights dimmed and then held a question and answer session with the crowd after the credits rolled.  The event was organized by "Capone" at Ain't It Cool News, who I was thrilled to finally lay eyes on after reading his work faithfully for years. 

When Paul began speaking, it struck me that I have actually seen his Role Models co-star, Seann William Scott (American Pie), in person as well. I was visiting a friend in New York City, and Scott just so happened to be at the same small restaurant, Turks & Frogs, where we were dining.  All of our plans to use code words if we ever spotted any celebrities flew out of the window when I pretty much just stared in disbelief at Seann and then made a really obvious head nod in his direction to my friend. 

Thankfully, last night's event with Paul did not leave me feeling stalkerish at all.  He was totally friendly and down-to-earth... and yes, ladies, he's every bit as cute as you remember him being in his breakout role in Clueless. He was also pretty cute in Over Her Dead Body, Knocked Up, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, and, well, every single movie he's ever made (including his cameo as John Lennon in Walk Hard).

But I digress.  Since the audience was comprised of fairly young film geeks, most of the questions revolved around Rudd's experiences as an actor and the process of making a movie.