Latest news with #comedy-drama
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Tom Basden Wants the Heartwarming Success of ‘The Ballad of Wallis Island' to Give British Indie Filmmakers Hope
Even Tom Basden is surprised by how affecting his new film is. The Brit, who stars in and wrote The Ballad of Wallis Island with comedian Tim Key, is talking to The Hollywood Reporter about finally getting his film out in theaters in his native Britain and, oddly enough, being a little taken aback by its reception. More from The Hollywood Reporter New Just For Laughs Fest Owner Tells Ticket Buyers: Laugh or Get a Refund 'Top Boy' and 'Eddington' Star Micheal Ward Charged With 2 Counts of Rape by London Police Kieron Moore Relishes Taking on Complex Characters, From 'Code of Silence' to Queer Camboy 'We hit a few ideas early on,' he explains, referencing the short film he, Key and director James Griffiths first made about the characters all the way back in 2006. 'Herb's a little bit washed up, pining for his mid-20s, Charles has been obsessed with this band for a very long time and used to watch the gigs with his wife, who's now died. Quite organically, a sadness began to come out on the page, a kind of longing,' Basden recalls. 'It took us by surprise. And even at the point where we were watching a finished film with an audience, I don't think we realized how emotional those threads were. It's very hard to plan for the moments that the audience is going to become emotionally invested.' Basden and Key's comedy-drama debuted earlier this year at Sundance, later earning a limited theatrical release in the U.S. in March before it hit theaters in the U.K. in May through Focus Features. It follows musician Herb McGwyer (Basden), formerly half of folk duo McGwyer Mortimer, who has been contracted to play a private gig on the remote Wallis Island by widowed superfan Charles Heath (Key). But things start to go awry when Herb discovers Charles has also invited ex-bandmate (and actual ex) Nell Mortimer, played by Carey Mulligan, to join. Akemnji Ndifornyen stars as Michael, Nell's American husband, and Sian Clifford as Amanda, the island's sole shopkeeper. What transpires is a film bursting at the seams with heart, adored by laymen and critics alike. 'We drew up a list for who could play the part of Nell and Carey was at the top of that list, but we didn't know her,' says Basden about getting Oscar nominee Mulligan on board. 'Tim had been emailed by her about five years earlier, so he had her email by stealth and basically cold-called her.' According to Basden, Mulligan connected with the material immediately. 'She just really responded to the script — I think she wanted to do a comedy,' he says. 'She'd done quite a lot of, let's say serious, quite dark films in the last few years. She wanted to do something that was more comic and more touching. She really believed in it as it was, and had exactly the same aims for the type of film that we wanted it to be.' After the release of their 2007 short, Basden and Key left Wallis Island well alone until 2018. It was then — and with the help of an industry-shattering pandemic — that the pair returned to their feature-length dreams in earnest. The low-budget movie got everything it needed in just 18 shooting days on location, but even at a cheaper rate, it took some time to find the financing. 'We really believed in the script and we deliberately made it very small,' says Basden. 'We're all in our 40s, or in James's case, 50s. We've made a lot of TV, we understand budgets. We made it a very small film with a very small cast, all shooting in basically two locations and even so, we struggled to get any interest,' he admits. 'We were turned down by all the funding bodies in the U.K.: Film4, the BFI…' 'And Tim is such an idealist that he always believed we'd make it,' continues Basden. 'I'm a bit more defeatist. (Laughs.) Then we sent it to Carey and not only do you suddenly have something quite real to hold onto — a genuine, Oscar-nominated film star attached to your film — but it gives renewed momentum and confidence for us that people, someone like Carey, really likes the script. But it just feels quite arbitrary, the funding system in the U.K… It's a fundamentally British film and it's done best in the U.K., but it took American money to actually get the thing made.' Basden hopes that The Ballad of Wallis Island — a well-received, popular movie written and starring British talent, about British people and shot in Britain — will provide hope to fellow filmmakers. 'I believe that it's possible in cinema to make things that are original and also really popular,' he says. 'There shouldn't be this divide between reboots, sequels, recycled IP and live-action and then the slightly soporific art-house movies. We must be able to make stuff that's original and funny and moving but also can be popular and attract a mainstream audience. I haven't given up on that.' One of the more amusing aspects of releasing the film both in the U.S. and in the U.K. has been seeing different reactions from Americans and British audiences to the adventures of Herb, Charles and Nell. He says that being in the States when The Ballad of Wallis Island debuted reminded him that his project was 'very much an international movie.' 'They'd never seen anything like Tim's character,' he remembers. '[They were like], 'He just makes no sense to me.' And then you show it in the U.K., and we all know people like that. One in four people in the U.K. are like that,' he says of Charles' bumbling awkwardness and quirky personality. 'It's a very different thing [in the U.K.], where people just tap into the very British subtext of it. But American audiences have been really into it. I think they feel like they've discovered something really fresh.' The heartwarming success of The Ballad of Wallis Island has only left fans with one question: what do Basden and Key have planned next? He jokes: 'Carey talks passionately about the sequel and I think, because we made the short and 18 years later released the feature, I think 18 years later we should come back and make the sequel to the feature. Maybe Charles and Amanda will get married, and McGwyer Mortimer are playing at the wedding.' He tells THR that him and Key have a few ideas they're working on — one or two of which they are 'very excited by.' For now, the duo are trying to soak up the fervid fan reaction to this pretty neat indie they've put out into the world. 'There'll come a point where we think about another one, maybe with a slightly bigger budget [and] made with love… But it feels very special to us that we've got here.' 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The Guardian
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘It was a buddy movie – and then they kissed': Stephen Frears and Hanif Kureishi on My Beautiful Laundrette at 40
It is a sweltering summer afternoon and I'm blowing bubbles over the heads of Stephen Frears and Hanif Kureishi while they have their pictures taken in a sun-dappled corner of the latter's garden. Perched in front of them as they sit side by side – Kureishi, who has been tetraplegic since breaking his neck in a fall in 2022, is in a wheelchair – is a silver cake made to look like a washing machine, commissioned to mark the 40th anniversary of their witty, raunchy comedy-drama My Beautiful Laundrette. Some of the bubbles land on the cake's surface, causing everyone present to make a mental note to skip the icing, while others burst on the brim of Frears's hat or drift into Kureishi's eyes. It is not perhaps the most dignified look for an esteemed duo celebrating an enduring Oscar-nominated gem. Don't think they haven't noticed, either. As the bubbles pop around them, Kureishi upbraids the photographer for trampling on his garden – 'Mind my flowers!' – while Frears grumbles: 'I could be watching the cricket.' Get them on to the subject of the film, though, and an aura of pride soon prevails. No wonder. My Beautiful Laundrette, which revolves around a run-down dive transformed into 'a jewel in the jacksie of south London' by an Anglo-Pakistani entrepreneur and his lover, did many things: it distilled and critiqued an entire political movement (Thatcherism), portrayed gay desire in unfashionably relaxed terms, and audaciously blended social realism with fable-like magic and cinematic grandeur. It launched a writer (Kureishi), a production company (Working Title, later the home of Richard Curtis), a prestigious composer (Hans Zimmer) and, most strikingly, one of the greatest of all actors: Daniel Day-Lewis, who plays Johnny, the ex-National Front thug teaming up (and copping off) with his former schoolmate Omar (Gordon Warnecke). Or 'Omo' as Johnny teasingly calls him even as he licks his neck in public or they douse one another in champagne. It is well known that Gary Oldman and Tim Roth were also in the running to play Johnny. Frears adds an unlikelier name to the mix. 'Kenneth Branagh came to see me,' says the 84-year-old film-maker. 'Half a second and you knew: 'Well, he's not right.' But good for him for wanting to do it.' The leading candidate seemed clear in Frears's mind, and not only because Day-Lewis threatened to break his legs if he didn't cast him. 'All the girls said: 'You want Dan.' He was top of the crumpet list at the Royal Court.' On screen, he is magnetically minimalist. 'Dan loved Clint Eastwood,' Kureishi points out. 'He loved how still Clint was. You can see the influence: Dan doesn't move very much.' Frears detected the echo of an even older star. 'I remember him standing by the lamppost under the bridge in the scene where he and Omar meet again, and I thought: 'Ah, I see. You want to play it like Marlene Dietrich.'' Kureishi, now 70, was already established as a young playwright before he wrote the film. Not that his father was impressed. 'He hadn't come to this country to see his son doing little plays above pubs,' he says in between sips of kefir. 'He thought I'd never make a living as a writer, so I really wanted to get moving.' Frears once likened reading My Beautiful Laundrette to 'finding a new continent'. In writing it, Kureishi combined scraps of autobiography with cinematic tropes. 'My dad had got me involved with a family friend called Uncle Adi, who ran garages and owned properties. He was kind of a grifter. He took me around these launderettes he owned in the hope that I would run them for him. They were awful fucking places; people were shooting up in there. So I thought I'd write about a bloke running a launderette. Then I thought: 'Well, he needs a friend.' It could be a buddy movie, like The Sting. But I couldn't get a hold on it. Then, as I was writing, they kissed – and suddenly everything seemed more purposeful. Now it was a love story as well as a story about a bloke going into business.' The tension between Omar and Johnny, his formerly racist pal-turned-lover, was drawn from Kureishi's own experience of growing up in south London. 'Lots of my friends had become skinheads. My best friend turned up at my house one day with cropped hair, boots, Ben Sherman shirt, all the gear. My dad nearly had a heart attack. He'd spent a lot of time trying not to be beaten up by skinheads. It was terrifying to be a Pakistani in south London in the 1970s.' Omar's uncle, exuberantly played by Saeed Jaffrey, was similarly lifted from life. 'He was based on a friend of my father's: a good-time boy who had a white mistress.' That lover was played in the film by Shirley Anne Field, star of the kitchen-sink classic Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. 'She was a woman of such grace and elegance,' sighs Kureishi. 'Dan and I would interrogate her all the time: 'Who's the most famous person you've slept with?' She'd slept with President Kennedy. And George Harrison!' He still sounds amazed. When Frears came on board, he made some invaluable suggestions. 'Stephen told me: 'Make it dirty,'' says Kureishi. 'That's a great note. Writing about race had been quite uptight and po-faced. You saw Pakistanis or Indians as a victimised group. And here you had these entrepreneurial, quite violent Godfather-like figures. He also kept telling me to make it like a western.' Frears looks surprised: 'Did I?' Kureishi replies: 'Yeah. I never knew what that meant.' There are visual touches that suggest the genre: a Butch Cassidy-esque bicycle ride, a Searchers-style final camera set-up peering through a doorway, not to mention a magnificent crane shot that hoists us from the back of the launderette and over its roof. 'I think what Stephen meant is that it's about two gangs getting ready to fight. The Pakistani group and the white thugs. There's something coming down the line.' His other note to Kureishi was that the film should have a happy ending. Why? 'We'd asked people to invest so much in these characters,' says Frears. 'And a sad ending is quite easy in an odd sort of way. This one's only happy in the last 10 seconds.' Kureishi agrees: 'Yeah. But you leave the cinema in a cheerful mood.' It was a happy ending for the film-makers, too. Frears recalls one reviewer observing that while Kureishi might not be able to spell, he could certainly write. That reminds me: the story goes that Kureishi deliberately misspelt the title as an indictment of his own education. But he scotches that rumour. 'I'm from Bromley,' he says. 'I thought that was how you spelled it.' If the film was a skyrocket for its writer, it heralded a new chapter for Frears. He had recently made his second film for cinema – the stylish, ruminative thriller The Hit starring Roth, John Hurt and Terence Stamp – 13 years after his debut, Gumshoe. Ironically, My Beautiful Laundrette, which was shot on 16mm for just £600,000, was only intended to be screened on Channel 4. But a rapturous premiere at the Edinburgh film festival, accompanied by acclaim from critics including the Guardian's Derek Malcolm, made a cinema release the only possible launchpad. Kureishi recalls that trip with fondness. 'I was in Edinburgh with Tim Bevan [of Working Title] and Dan, and we all slept in the same room. I made sure I got the bed, and the others were on the floor. Dan didn't even have a suitcase, just a toothbrush. Every night, he'd wash his underwear and his socks in the sink and put them on again the next day.' Blown up to 35mm, this low-budget TV film became a magnet for rave reviews here and in the US (the New Yorker's Pauline Kael called it 'startlingly fresh'), bagged Kureishi an Oscar nomination and helped reinvigorate Frears's movie career, paving the way for later hits including Dangerous Liaisons, The Grifters and The Queen. Neither of them has seen it recently. 'I don't watch my old films,' Frears says with a grimace. 'You either sit there thinking: 'I should have done that better.' Or else: 'That's rather good. Why can't I do that any more?'' I assure them that the picture looks better than ever, whether it's the visual panache of Oliver Stapleton's cinematography or the enchanting subtlety of Warnecke's performance, which was rather overshadowed by Day-Lewis at the time but can now be seen to chart delicately Omar's gradual blossoming. It goes without saying that My Beautiful Laundrette was ahead of its time, especially in its blase approach to queerness. When the picture was released in the UK at the end of 1985, homophobia was becoming more virulent and widespread in the media as cases of Aids escalated. The Conservative government's section 28 legislation, outlawing the 'promotion' of homosexuality by local authorities, was just over two years away. The timing of the film's re-emergence today is not lost on its author. 'It's so hard to be gay now,' says Kureishi. 'There's all this hostility toward LGBT people, so it feels important that the film is out there again in this heavily politicised world where being gay or trans is constantly objectified. It's a horrible time.' Interviewed in 1986 by Film Comment magazine, however, Kureishi dismissed the idea of it as a 'gay film', and derided the whole concept of categories. 'There's no such thing as a gay or black sensibility,' he said then. How does he feel today? 'I still don't want to be put in a category. I didn't like it when people called me a 'writer of colour' because I'm more than that.' The film, too, is multilayered. 'It's about class, Thatcherism, the Britain that was emerging from the new entrepreneurial culture. I didn't want it to be restricted by race or sexuality, and that hasn't changed.' I wonder if it rankles, then, that My Beautiful Laundrette was voted the seventh best LGBTQ+ film of all time in a 2016 BFI poll. And it does – though not for the reason I had anticipated. 'What was above it?' demands Frears in a huff. 'Why didn't it win?' Still, both men are thrilled that the film was embraced by queer audiences. 'If Stephen and I have done anything to make more people gay, we'd be rather proud of that.' My Beautiful Laundrette is in cinemas from 1 August. Frears, Kureishi and Warnecke will take part in a Q&A following a screening on 25 July at the Cinema Rediscovered festival in Bristol
Forbes
7 days ago
- Entertainment
- Forbes
Actor Ike Barinholtz Will Play Elon Musk In Sam Altman OpenAI Movie
Actor Ike Barinholtz is in talks to portray the world's richest person, Elon Musk, in an upcoming comedy-drama movie that will reportedly center on the brief ousting of billionaire Sam Altman from the helm of OpenAI in 2023. Elon Musk will reportedly be portrayed in the upcoming film "Artificial." (Photo by Chip ...) Getty Images The upcoming film, 'Artificial,' is still in development at Amazon MGM Studios and is expected to shoot later this year with a planned release for 2026, multiple outlets reported. Actor Ike Barinholtz, who recently scored an Emmy nomination for his role in 'The Studio,' is in talks to play Elon Musk in the film, multiple outlets reported Wednesday. Andrew Garfield is attached to play another billionaire, OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman, with actor Yura Borisov also set to play OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever. Though few details of the plot are known, the film is described as a comedy-drama about the few days between Altman's firing and re-hiring as OpenAI's CEO in November 2023. Luca Guadagnino, known for his films including 'Call Me By Your Name' and 'Challengers,' is directing the project. Forbes has reached out to Amazon MGM Studios for comment. Matthew Belloni, entertainment reporter at Puck, claimed he obtained a copy of the 'Artificial' script, stating Musk and Altman will 'probably hate their portrayals' and that Musk is referred to as a 'dictator' at one point in the script. Belloni noted the script is a draft and could change before the movie shoots, but said Musk appears in a few scenes of 'villainy and comic relief.' Other billionaires included in the draft, according to Belloni, include former OpenAI vice president of research and current Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, as well as Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. Why Was Sam Altman Fired From Openai? Altman, who co-founded OpenAI in 2015 and was installed as CEO in 2019, was fired from his post on Nov. 17, 2023 by the company's board, which said it no longer had 'confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI.' In its statement, the board accused Altman of not being candid with it, though the details surrounding his firing, which was considered a shock, were unclear. The following year, board member Helen Toner, who helped oust Altman, said Altman made the board's job 'really difficult' by 'withholding information, misrepresenting things that were happening at the company' and sometimes 'outright lying to the board,' alleging he did not inform the board about ChatGPT's 2022 release. She also claimed two executives said they had endured 'psychological abuse' and a 'toxic atmosphere' crafted by Altman. Hundreds of employees threatened to quit OpenAI after Altman's firing, and on Nov. 22, the board announced Altman would be reinstated. Sutskever, who is portrayed in 'Artificial,' was reportedly a leader of the effort to remove Altman, though he later expressed regret for the ouster and signed the open letter threatening to quit unless Altman was reinstated. Musk has been parodied multiple times on 'Saturday Night Live,' which he lambasted in posts on X. After Dana Carvey tackled Musk in a post-election episode in November, Musk tweeted 'SNL' has been 'dying slowly for years, as they become increasingly out of touch with reality.' In a separate post, he said 'Dana Carvey just sounds like Dana Carvey.' Musk was parodied months later by Mike Myers, prompting the billionaire to post: 'SNL hasn't been funny in a long time. They are their own parody.' Musk hosted 'SNL' in 2021, and three years later, cast member Chloe Fineman said he was 'rude' on set and made her cry by calling a sketch she had written 'not funny.' Forbes Valuation Forbes estimates Musk's net worth at $415 billion as of Wednesday, making him the wealthiest person in the world. He owns about 12% of Tesla and 42% of SpaceX, both of which he co-founded. Altman is worth $1.8 billion, according to Forbes estimates, largely from his investments in Stripe, Reddit and other companies. Further Reading Luca Guadagnino to Direct True-Life OpenAI Movie 'Artificial' for Amazon MGM (Hollywood Reporter)
