Film interviews

In the age of social media, brickbat comments are an occupational hazard for any filmmaker. Actual bricks, thankfully, tend to be a lot rarer. But when the powerful Georgia-set LGBTQ+ drama ‘And Then We Danced’ opened in its capital Tbilisi, the trolls actually turned up to the cinema – and things got scary, fast. ‘We screened the film for three days,’ says writer-director Levan Akin, ‘and audiences seeing it had to brave crazy people throwing rocks at them. It was insane.’ ‘I wanted to do something hopeful because it’s such dark times we’re living in’ With police guarding screenings from the homophobic mob, 6,000 brave souls caught Akin’s powerful story of a young dancer getting to grips with his sexuality. The film, which premiered at Cannes before opening in Tbilisi in November, reflects an intolerant society – and that society decided to reflect itself straight back. Ultra-nationalist groups protested against it; even the church weighed in. ‘I still get death threats,’ says Akin. ‘The creepiest ones are voice messages on Instagram.’ But there’s been a ton of love too, with filmmakers like ‘God’s Own Country’ director Francis Lee reaching out in solidarity and supportive messages flowing in. ‘I get 50 of them a day,’ says Akin. ‘Someone said: “I brought my grandma to the movie. She’s never seen a gay person and she was crying by the end.” We can reach those people.’ Thanks to that eventful cinema run, a warm Cannes reception and its growing international profile, ‘And Then

With two wins at the Baftas and six nominations at this year’s Academy Awards, including nods for Best Picture and Best Director, South Korean filmmaker Bong Joon-ho has made one of the buzziest films this awards season. The first Korean film to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2019 (and the first to win with a unanimous vote since 2013), ‘Parasite’ is a gripping, humorous and horrifying social-satire-cum-home-invasion drama for our times. We meet the director to talk about class and finding hope in his dark work.   Your new film is about a struggling family that secretly feeds off a wealthy one via various jobs. Class feels central to so many of your movies. Why does the subject interest you?‘I never intended to focus on the issue of class. I do see this gap between the rich and the poor. But even more than that, I’ve always been interested in stories about money and power. Those are the dramas that fascinate me. I’m not really that into superheroes.’ You’re crushing dreams. Where did the idea for ‘Parasite’ come from?‘When I was in college, I tutored for a rich family. It was more than just tutoring – I felt like I was peeping into their private lives. Of course, I didn’t do anything bad like in “Parasite”.’ That house you shot in is incredible. Where did you find it?‘I knew the basic structure I wanted, but we couldn’t find the right house, so we actually built it. The poor family’s house too – we built it in a water tank so we could do the flood sequence.’ Park So-dam as K

What’s your first London moviegoing memory? ‘I grew up in Yorkshire, so the first ones I remember were when I moved to London in my twenties. I lived on the Harringay Ladder, and being an actor and having bizarre timetables, I’d go to the Screen on the Green in the afternoon and take over one of the sofas. I’d pay for one seat then manspread.’ What’s your favourite London cinema? ‘Clapham Picturehouse. I’m not a massive fan of the big franchise blockbusters and I’m really, really bad when it comes to popcorn. I turn into this cantankerous old man when it comes to popcorn, so I gravitate to the smaller screens where there’s less scope for noise.’ ‘I got to spend hours asking Diane Keaton everything you’d ever want to ask her about Woody Allen and “The Godfather”’ Have you been to any immersive cinema experiences? ‘I went to my first one recently: “Romeo + Juliet” at Secret Cinema. My girlfriend and I sat on a rug, drank a bottle of wine and felt very nostalgic. Did I get into character? I went in a Hawaiian shirt, but if anyone had come up to me to do immersive acting, I’d have run a mile. I get nervous that someone might spot me being very earnest.’ Which films would you say sum up London? ‘It has to be something like “The Long Good Friday”, “Withnail and I” or Terence Davies’s “The Deep Blue Sea”: nostalgic films with that smog-ridden vibe.’ Tom Hiddleston and Rachel Weisz in ‘The Deep Blue Sea’. Photograph: Film4/Artificial Eye What’s been your most memorable place to shoot

You know how busy you are? Pretty darn busy, right? Like, unfairly so. But a tenner says Morfydd Clark is even busier. The Welsh actor has recently been a fixture on our tellies in ‘Dracula’ and ‘His Dark Materials’; she has buzz horror film ‘Saint Maud’ coming out in March and schizophrenia drama ‘Eternal Beauty’ on the horizon too. This week she’s appearing in ‘The Personal History of David Copperfield’ in not one but two roles, and is currently in New Zealand working on Amazon’s new ‘The Lord of the Rings’ in a role rumoured to be a young Galadriel (she can’t comment). She deserves the lie-in I rudely deprive her of when I call at 7 am to ask her about elves. You’ve got ‘David Copperfield’, ‘Dracula’, ‘His Dark Materials’ and ‘Saint Maud’ all happening. How does it feel to be having a moment? ‘Very surreal but because I’m in [New Zealand], I feel a bit detached from it – in a nice way. My sister just messaged me and said, “Your poster is on the tube!” It’s very exciting.’ What can you tell us about ‘The Lord of the Rings’? ‘Well, it’s based in the Second Age and... that’s probably it.’ [Laughs] Tolkien’s Elvish was influenced by Welsh. Has your native tongue come in handy so far? ‘Oh, definitely. People ask me how to say words and I feel really smug. I read “The Hobbit” when I was at school and I remember my mum telling me every day that Elvish was based on Welsh. I was like, “I know! You told me already.”’ As Dora in ‘The Personal History of David Copperfield’. Photograph

Having made two Bond films in ‘Skyfall’ and ‘Spectre’, Sam Mendes isn’t desperately keen to chat about a third one. ‘If there’s one way to take your mind out of it, it’s to make a movie as engrossing as this one,’ he says of the transition from 007 to ‘1917’, steering the conversation gently but unmistakably back to his Oscar-tipped war epic, for which he just picked up Golden Globe awards for Best Director and Best Motion Picture – Drama. You can forgive him for sounding a touch testy when facing the inevitable questions about Bond: his brilliant, spectacularly ambitious new World War I men-on-a-mission film has been an all-consuming journey – often to the outer limits of his sanity. Following two British soldiers (George MacKay and Dean-Charles Chapman) behind enemy lines, and based loosely on a story his grandfather, a veteran of the war, told him, it’s shot in really, really long takes stitched together with invisible edits. ‘There were days when it seemed ridiculous,’ he laughs.  Did you have any moments where you thought: Okay, I've bitten off a bit much here?‘Every day at some point I thought: Why have I done this to myself? I was sort of trapped a little bit by the script. I wrote it with Krysty [Wilson-Cairns] but really it was my idea, so I couldn’t look to someone else to get me out of it. I’d do a seven-minute take and, after six minutes and 30 seconds of magic, someone trips and [snaps fingers] you have to start again. That can be heartbreaking. But when you do g

Alongside Lady Gaga’s Superbowl show, that adorable toddler who gatecrashed her dad’s Very Serious BBC interview and ‘Ping-Pong Trick Shots 3’, YouTube belonged to Rapman in 2017. With his three-part internet gang drama ‘Shiro’s Story’, the south-east Londoner pretty much reinvented urban filmmaking, shooting guerilla-style and often permitless, and stitching the footage into 14-minute episodes that debuted online. Instead of exposition, he threw in raps: filling gaps in its story of two estranged mates with punchy rhymes like a whole new kind of Greek chorus. The result? 20 million views and Hollywood’s attention. Fast forward a couple of years, and he’s making his filmmaking debut proper with ‘Blue Story’ this week. Set mainly in Deptford and Peckham and tackling the bloody – and ongoing – postcode wars, it’s a cautionary tale about four mates from opposing sides of a gang war. There ares guns and knives but like ‘Shiro’s Story’, it’s far from sensational. ‘I want to show how an innocent kid picks up a knife,’ says Rapman, ‘and I want a gang member to leave the cinema and think: Why am I doing this?’ Watch an exclusive clip from ‘Blue Story’: Otherwise known as Andrew Onwubolu, Rapman calls it his version of film school: ‘“Shiro’s Story” was my early years; “Blue Story” is like my dissertation and my final exam.’ He’s buzzed to be making the leap from iPhone to multiplex and is hopeful his audience goes with him. ‘[It’s a big leap] to go from doing something on YouTube

Like a second blast of raw social conscience, Ken Loach’s new film ‘Sorry We Missed You’ follows ‘I, Daniel Blake’ with another Newcastle-set drama about people struggling at the very edge of their means. The characters at its core – delivery driver Ricky (Kris Hitchen) and his carer wife Abbie (Debbie Honeywood) – are our entry point into a bleak new economy. It’s a heartrending tale suffused with all the veteran director’s usual humanity and warmth. As he tells me, he’s not giving up filmmaking just yet. He just needs to sort the garden out first. What was the spark for this story?‘It was visiting food banks on “I, Daniel Blake” and realising that a lot of people who were going were actually working. Jobs have gone from being secure to insecure, and new technology means people are just exploited harder.’ Did the real-life case of driver Don Lane, who died while working on a zero-hours contract, influence you at all?‘We didn’t know about that when we were doing the film. Don’s case was shocking – more extreme than we show in the film – and we met his wife, who’s a brave woman. [Screenwriter] Paul Laverty went to meet lots of drivers and drove around with one or two.’ Ricky drives a white van. Did you see the film as a corrective to the stereotype of ‘white van man’?‘It wasn’t consciously that we were fighting a stereotype, although I suppose we were. It was just focusing on the people doing the work and seeing how knackered they are.’ It’s very stark to see him carry a bottl

No location was too extreme, remote or dangerous for Alejandro Landes while making his visually lush Colombian kids-at-war movie ‘Monos’, he tells Dan Jolin. ‘Monos’ has been compared to ‘Apocalypse Now’. How does that make you feel?‘Well, it’s definitely visceral and dreamy, so I guess they have that in common. I wanted this film to stand on its own, but it flirts with genre. You feel that from the Russian film “Come and See”, or Claire Denis’s “Beau Travail” or “Apocalypse Now”. There are influences from films like “Predator” and “Platoon” as well.’ The film is set partly in the Colombian highlands. What were the challenges of filming at altitude? ‘We were four hours from Bogota and 4,000 metres up, so there was little oxygen. It was very intense and so cold. You’re enveloped in a cloud, and the next second there is bright equatorial sun and the next it’s torrential rain. It just made you crazy, because you can’t follow any plan.’ ‘I got carried out on a stretcher’ For the later scenes, you moved to a canyon in the heart of the jungle, which can’t have been much easier?‘We had a pack of mules, and Colombia’s national kayak team would take us [to the location] on rafts. The only people who knew the area were illegal gold miners – and they became our production assistants. Everyone cried on this shoot, including me at some points. I got carried out on a stretcher once.’ What happened? ‘I couldn’t stand up. I was in such pain. The medic diagnosed me with appendicitis. I had th

Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje has been part of some surprising stories in his time. He was violent crime lord Mr Eko in ‘Lost’, Killer Croc in ‘Suicide Squad’ and a vicious killer in ‘Oz’ (he’s played a lot of killers). He’s appeared in a ‘Thor’ movie and popped up in ‘Game of Thrones’. But none of those fantastical narratives are half as startling as the one he’s turned into his directorial debut – his own. ‘Farming’ is an account of how, as a young black man, he became a white supremacist. The actor-turned-filmmaker was born in 1967 to Nigerian parents. At barely six weeks old, he was given to a white foster family in Tilbury, Essex. The hope was that he’d have a better life, but these were the dark days of Enoch Powell and the National Front. His blackness made him unusual – and largely unwanted – in a very white town. ‘Every time I went out, I was reminded [that I was different],’ he says. ‘It didn’t matter how much you tried to assimilate. I remember walking to primary school and a policeman called me over. He smiled at me, then spat in my face and drove away. I’d done nothing.’ A whole childhood of abuse brought the teenage Akinnuoye-Agbaje to the horrifying decision to join a gang of skinheads. He hoped it would give him some protection. Damson Idris (centre) as Enitan in Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje’s ‘Farming’.  Photograph Angus Young ‘I remember watching them clash with police,’ he says. ‘There was an area they used to hang out in and the police tried to move them on. They s

As Massive British Comedy writers go, Jesse Armstrong is probably second only to Phoebe Waller-Bridge right now. ‘Succession’, his brilliant HBO show about a chaotic media dynasty, won him an Emmy last month. He has ‘Peep Show’, ‘The Thick of It’, ‘Fresh Meat’ and ‘Veep’ on his gem-laden CV. Now he’s reteamed up with his ‘Four Lions’ co-writer Chris Morris for ‘The Day Shall Come’, an FBI-skewering satire that centres on a group of bungling black rights activists in Florida, which Morris also directs. When did ‘The Day Shall Come’ start for you?‘Maybe eight years ago? Chris had clocked these cases that weren’t technically entrapment by the FBI’s definition, but in common parlance would be. The case of the Liberty City Seven [a 2006 case very similar to the one in the film, in which a religious cult in Miami was nudged by the FBI to plan terrorist attacks it had no means of carrying out] was the germ that started it for him.’ As two middle-class white men, did you and Chris Morris worry if you were the right people to write about working-class black men in America? ‘It’s a valid question [and] you have to be aware of that. I remember going into “Four Lions” and thinking: This feels scary. It’s about terrorists and it’s white people writing about brown people. But the research guides you. Most of [the cases involved] people of colour. You do it carefully and be as honest as you can.’ ‘I don’t think you can think: God, Trump’s really crazy so we have to make the film crazier’ H