Category: Film Review

John Crowley’s eclectic and underrated career has spanned various genres and mediums. After kicking off his creative talents via the stage, he’s since transitioned into feature films and television, with credits including Intermission, Is Anybody There?, Boy A, Closed Circuit, and most recently, the Oscar nominated Brooklyn. He contributed to True Detective Season 2, and his sterling theater resume includes such diverse works as A Behanding in Spokane, A Steady Rain, The Pillowman, MacBeth, Into the Woods, The Crucible, and The Master Builder. He recently chatted with Nick about his career, his Irish roots, the amazing success of Brooklyn, and what the future holds. We hope you enjoy this informative Q&A!

Thanks for chatting with me, John. Ok, off the top, I just want to tell you how much I loved A Behanding in Spokane! My wife and I went to NYC and sat in the second row early in the run and that was just a blast. What was it like when you read that play for the first time?

Thanks so much! Yeah, that was a surreal one. It was like nothing I had seen or heard before. Coming from the great Martin McDonagh, you know you’re in for a treat, something special every time. But this just had that special combination of humor and drama, with a sort of Tarantino-inspired sense of quirky violence. It was a tricky tone to pull off on stage, but I think we nailed it. Audiences really sparked to it.

And what an amazing cast of actors you had to work with, that must’ve been a treat.

Yeah, we were blessed with some serious talent on that show, with Christopher Walken really running away with the entire piece. It was good and nasty fun.

How did you get your start in the film industry? Was it initially through the Irish film community?

Yeah, after starting in the theater, I moved into features and television, and yes, the Irish film world has been a big part of my understanding of the business and the artistic process. I’ve done projects like Intermission where we had an Irish crew and cast, and I’ve been able to do stuff like True Detective, this most recent season, which allowed me to expand a bit. I’ve done work in television in Europe as well.

I’ve long been a fan of Intermission, one of your early films with Colin Farrell. What was it like when you read that script?

Mark O’Rowe had really written something special, and I felt like it was a story that I knew exactly how to tell. It was an Irish production, and the energy was great, and I think we made a lasting piece that many people have found over time. Great cast of Irish actors, too.

Boy-A. I want to tell you how brilliant I think that film is. It’s so brutal and honest. It’s one of those small gems that I tell everyone to see. How did that come about?

Thank you! Yeah, that was a challenging piece, Peter Mullan and Andrew Garfield both had heavy loads to carry, and they both did it with serious resolve, and without ever backing down to the material. Challenging stuff for sure, with a script that pulled no punches. That was an interesting project because of its gestation, how it was on television here in the UK and then the Weinstein brothers saw and it and got interested and put it out in a small number of theaters in America. It’s a hard-hitting piece that has thankfully found a passionate group of supporters.

How did you first get involved with Brooklyn?

I had read the book for pleasure while working on the Broadway show A Behanding in Spokane and I immediately responded to it, in a very emotional way. However, the studios weren’t interested in making it, which presented some interesting challenges in getting it made. But people got it very quick with this project, or they just didn’t. It’s just not their business model, the studios, to make a film like Brooklyn. The financing came from a patchwork of sources, including Telefilm, The Irish Film Board, BBC, BFI, with some Canadian money in there, too. It was a true and classic independent production.

Were you nervous about how an intimate project like Brooklyn might be perceived by audiences who are growing more and more accustomed to CGI spectacle and bombast?

Nobody trusted this project except for a core group of people. I knew what we had because I had read the book and Nick Hornby’s wonderful script. It was a story I felt I could do justice. There was never a doubt in my mind. And audiences found it. It helps when your film is based on a beloved book, but I was always confident that audiences would be smart and patient enough to find our little film.

What was it like working with Saoirse Ronan? She really came into her own as a full blown leading actress in Brooklyn delivering one of the best performances in 2015.

Saoirse is wonderful. She’s so talented, and I’ve been such a fan all throughout the years. Her work in Atonement demonstrated a certain degree of stability, a sense of maturity that you rarely see in an actress that young. And she’s taken on interesting roles ever since, with Brooklyn serving as her big moment. I couldn’t be more proud of her. She anchored our film with a quiet reserve, this sense of nobility. And that’s not on the page, that’s something that comes from within a performer.

How do you feel that Ireland has progressed in terms of cinema? Are you happy with the current state of affairs?

The way it’s looking right now, there’s a lot of very interesting directors moving up the ranks. We’ve got confident filmmakers telling universal stories, without trying to be American in any sense of the word. There’s a filmmaking contingent in Ireland that’s very passionate about homegrown stories. And on the other end of it, you have Hollywood bringing over talents like Lenny Abrahamson and Fassbender and Saoirse – suddenly there’s this spotlight on Irish talent. And I think the result of all of this is a healthy funding situation in Ireland with quite a number of interesting projects getting made.

How connected are you to the Hollywood machine?

I’ve lived in London the last 18 years! Hollywood is important for my career, of course, and without some of the relationships I’ve made, I might not have gotten some work, or been considered for some jobs. But I like to think of myself as living outside of the intensity of the system, but ready to work with anyone if the material is proper.

Are you consciously looking for “Irish stories” to tell?

Not in the sense that a story needs to be Irish in order for me to be interested in it. I’m attracted to the universal quality of storytelling, and a film like Brooklyn, even with its Irish sensibility, is still a work that can speak to any nationality. It’s all about the experience and the journey for the character, that’s what attracts me to material. And while I am certainly drawn to Irish stories and homegrown material on a personal level, I certainly never set out to be known as strictly an “Irish filmmaker.”

How hard is it to move back and forth from the stage to the cinema?

It’s different yet similar. My experiences have been great on both sides, but I think it comes down to how you interact with the actors, and how they adjust to their roles and to their surroundings. I grew up in the theater, and sort of used my experiences there as a way to get into the film and television world. One thing prepared me for the other.

Do you have a preference?

No, not really, because both mediums allow for different levels of success, or failure. I like being challenged by the intricacies of both forms, and the experiences I’ve had from stage work has informed my film work, and vice versa.

You recently directed episodes of True Detective: Season Two, which reunited you with Colin Farrell. What was your experience there?

That was interesting because of the hype and the serious interest in the show. It had that water cooler effect, whether people liked it or not. And from the scripts, I knew that season two would be very different from the first. Justin Lin had set a very solid foundation for the other directors to step in and continue the story. I enjoyed working with HBO very much.

What are you currently working on now? Any new theater offerings or new films in development?

Next up is The Present, an updated version of Chekhov’s first play Platonov. I directed it at Sydney Theatre Company last August and it features Cate Blanchett and Richard Roxburgh. We’re transferring it to Broadway later in the year. Meanwhile I’m at the early stage of development on a bunch of things, some TV and some feature films but I can’t say what just yet!

I’ve never seen anything like The Stunt Man. There will never, ever be another movie quite like The Stunt Man. This film has a very unique tone that is nearly impossible to pin down. It’s a satire of Hollywood. It’s a romance. It’s a drama. It’s a break-neck action picture. It’s a madcap comedy. This film is so many things, but most importantly, it has a wildly distinct personality, feeling like a film that just HAD to be made by the person who made it. The Stunt Man isn’t even really a film – it feels more like a carnival of ideas and action, totally off the reservation, made with a jocular style that has moments of peculiar beauty, and featuring performances that just have to be seen to be believed. There’s a raggedy quality to the film, an “in-progress” ambience that befits the movie-within-a-movie structure of the story, and the freewheeling style allows for much self-reflexivity on the part of Rush and his team of craftsmen. A notoriously tortured production, The Stunt Man has taken on the label of “lost classic” over the years, and it’s a film that many people probably have seen a long time ago but have fuzzy memories of now. It’s absolutely worth a revisit and reconsideration, if for no other reason that something this singularly bizarre and eccentric should be discussed more often than the generic, franchise-able crap that so often litters our multiplexes.

The Stunt Man, which was released in 1980, was adapted for the screen by Rush from Paul Brodeur’s novel, and centers on a Vietnam veteran named Cameron (Steven Railsback in an emotionally wild performance of astonishingly broad range) who has an run-in with the cops, flees, and accidentally ends up on the set of a big-budget WWI movie that’s being filmed on a near-by beach by a flamboyant and utterly tyrannical director named Eli (Peter O’Toole in a massively entertaining wink-wink performance) who hides the man under the guise of being a stuntman on his picture, who he then uses in a series of outlandish and death-defying set-pieces, sometimes without his participant’s full knowledge of all of the rules. Cameron can’t help but fall in love with the film’s leading lady, Nina (Barbara Hershey, sexy and funny), whose romantic past with her director causes Cameron to become a tad unhinged.

Cameron also starts to realize that his potentially insane boss has made it a habit of pushing his previous stunt-men to their limits, with possibly deadly results. Will Cameron’s cover be blown? Will he survive the increasingly crazy film production? Will he and Nina be able to live happily ever after? Cameron’s life starts to bleed from reality to fantasy and then back to reality, sometimes within the same scene, as Eli continues to press on in the most insane of manners, creating hostility between him and his crew, his actors, and pretty much everyone around him. Then the day comes for the film’s climatic action scene to be shot, and Cameron isn’t sure if Eli is out to sabotage him in an unsuspecting way, or if he’s just doing everything all in the name of cinema and for the perfect shot.

Rush was a filmmaker who understood the idea of madcap comedy better than most, and in The Stunt Man, he brought a level of gonzo energy to the film’s multiple action sequences, which, simply put, are all fabulous to observe and dissect. If you’re going to call your movie The Stunt Man you better have some great stunts to show off, and I just don’t understand how people weren’t killed while making certain sequences of this hilariously over the top film. One bit in particular, with Railsback running along the sides of houses and over roof-tops while planes are flying overhead and soldiers are firing rounds at him and jumping on him from all angles – it’s berserk, it’s hysterical, it’s all totally over the top, and finally amazing. No blue screens, no CGI, all real stunt work, with people crashing through balsa wood and sugar glass. This is a film that is all about the art of deception, and how cinema has the ability to lie to us yet make it look real and honest.

The Stunt Man also has a casual vulgarity that I just loved, with out of the blue nudity, random bits of seemingly improvised dialogue, a ton of looped audio that unintentionally ramps up the odd humor, and a general sense of anything goes/anything can happen which keeps the film hurtling along with a sense of unpredictability that is rarely matched. And then there’s the truly insane ending, with the film’s credits rolling while one of the actors is still talking, trying to make sense of his situation, and it’s like Rush is saying to everyone, himself included: “Hey, it’s just a movie.” Because Rush was attempting to bite off SO much with this effort, it feels like his ultimate “kitchen sink” film, something he made as if he were never going to direct a film again, cramming it with as many ideas and obsessions as he possibly could.

And that was sort of the case. After sitting on the shelf for over a year due to a lack of completion funds, 20th Century Fox bought the film, but Rush ended up battling it out with the studio over a botched release, despite the film being nominated for Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Actor for O’Toole. It then took Rush 14 years to return to the director’s chair (he was fired off of 1990’s Air America, for which he wrote the original script) for the ill-fated erotic thriller Color of Night, which became infamous as “that movie where Bruce Willis felt the need to show the world his bellend.” It’s a shame that Hollywood loves to forget about genuine voices like Rush, and Martin Brest, and Michael Cimino, filmmakers who were interested in telling stories outside of the cookie-cutter norm, guys with too much of an idiosyncratic view and style for the studio bean-counters.

Peter Berg’s thrilling action picture The Kingdom is a ballsy, big-budget production that brings a surprising level of smarts to its relatively predictable and straight forward story. It’s a bummer that this movie didn’t find the theatrical audience it deserved. It’s a tightly focused procedural with solid acting, credible plotting, and shot with an amazingly immediate, semi-chaotic but still coherent visual style that puts you in the middle of the action at all times. The opening credits sequence is a total wowser, dispensing with a ton of information and political backstory during the first five minutes, while the audience is presented with an arresting animated timeline detailing the Unites States’ relationship with the insanely corrupt nation of Saudi Arabia, all stemming from the importance of oil. We’re then plunged right into the middle of a multi-stage terrorist attack on an American housing complex in Saudi Arabia which leaves 100 people dead, many of whom are women and children. Berg didn’t shy away from graphic violence in The Kingdom; rarely do you see a big-budget Hollywood action film that will actually show you on-screen deaths of women and children and innocent bystanders like THE KINGDOM does. Those moments, while shocking, are important. Without them, the filmmakers would be diluting the situation of its impact and realism. Innocent people die when terrorists strike, yet for the most part, Hollywood enjoys its killings bloodless and faceless. Not here. Multiple strikes are coordinated against U.S. interests, the stakes are raised, and it’s time for a response.

The FBI learns that a few agents were also killed in the attacks so they send Jamie Foxx, playing senior agent Ronald Fleury, and his team to try and apprehend the killers. Chris Cooper, Jennifer Garner, and Jason Bateman make up his squad and each are give more than a few moments to shine. They rendezvous with a sympathetic Saudi policeman named Faris, played by the excellent Ashraf Barhom, who was also fantastic in the supreme (and controversial) political drama Paradise Now, in an effort to gain solid footing. The middle section of the movie resembles a television procedural, but it becomes deeper than that. The relationship that develops between Fleury and Faris is serious and complex, never feeling phony or contrived. These two men are fighting the same fight, and while their backgrounds are different, they are able to agree on what is right and what is wrong. The character shadings that Faris has are important and distinct, and this is where The Kingdom elevates itself over most other action films in the genre. As much as it’s concerned with blowing stuff up real good (and that it does), Berg, and screenwriter Matthew Michael Carnahan, no doubt guided by producer Michael Mann, showcase the frustrations that would accompany an investigation like this. The filmmakers keep the storytelling efficient and coherent, with Foxx in fine form as the commanding officer in charge, and Cooper, as always, giving a sturdy supporting performance as a take no nonsense soldier ready to throw down at a moment’s notice. Garner is also excellent, channeling her role from Alias in some extremely physical fight sequences, and lending the movie a tender heart in a few sequences. And Bateman does his usual self-effacing routine but this time with a machine-gun; he gets all the script’s wisecracks and delivers them in an unforced manner while also getting a chance to flex his action muscles.

The Kingdom served as  Berg’s coming out as a big-time director of action (he’d later go on to direct Hancock, Battleship, and most impressively, Lone Survivor). The last third of The Kingdom, which basically boils down to 30 minute long extended action sequence, is a tour de force of staging, logistics, and pyrotechnics. Beginning with a high speed car chase and highway ambush that evolves into a Black Hawk Down-style urban-combat sequence, Berg never lets the viewer out of his grasp. RPG’s fly all over the place while automatic gun-fire explodes from every direction. Cinematographer Mauro Fiore, who has worked for action vets like Michael Bay on The Island, Jim Cameron on Avatar, and Antoine Fuqua on Training Day and The Equalizer, covers the action at the ground level, heightening every visceral moment for maximum impact. Employing a similar shooting and editing style to that of what Paul Greengrass cultivated with his work on the Bourne franchise and United 93, the restless camera never stops moving and searching, which amps up every sequence. You haven’t seen an SUV flip over like the way you do here. The highly bloody and intimate machine gun violence, reminiscent of the close-quarter shoot-outs in Munich, are pulse-pounding and flinch-inducing. And one sequence, with Garner engaged in hand-to-hand combat with a baddie, is unrelenting in its primal impact. Berg has a feeling for authenticity that’s reminiscent of the works of Mann, and the here-and-now quality of the locations and sets are incredible. But the real coup of the movie are its final moments. The Kingdom ends on a note of surprising darkness and honest reflection; without spoiling anything, you’re reminded that the cycle of violence in our current climate is something that will never end and can’t be easily fixed. It’s a small moment but it adds weight to everything that has come before it.

Tony Scott’s late-career, ultra-impressionistic style began taking its roots with the gloriously hyperactive Beat the Devil, his contribution to the historic BMW film series, The Hire, which was a series of extended car commercials in the guise of slick and exciting short films with serious Hollywood pedigree. The talent in front of and behind the camera on The Hire was staggering. Directors included John Woo, Wong Kar-Wai, Joe Carnahan, Ang Lee, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, Guy Ritchie, John Frankenheimer and Scott with an acting lineup featuring the likes of Don Cheadle, Mickey Rourke, Madonna, Gary Oldman, James Brown, Danny Trejo, Stellan Skarsgard, F. Murray Abraham, Ray Liotta, Dennis Haysbert, Maury Chaykin, and Marilyn Manson. And for those of us who had hoped to see Clive Owen as the next James Bond, we’ll always have The Hire, where Owen plays the nameless Driver, an expert behind the wheel (always a BMW, naturally) who is tasked with various life-threatening missions with differing degrees of difficulty. The one linking thread between the different films was Owen, who brought a manly command to the lead role that helped solidify the entire series.

Beat the Devil is the most out-right entertaining film of the bunch, and it’s the one that seems to be having the most fun. It centers on the idea that James Brown (who played himself), back in his youth, sold his soul to the Devil (a hysterical Gary Oldman, in flashy make-up and garish costume that has to be seen to be believed) in exchange for the chance to have a legendary career. But now that the rocker is getting old, he wants to renegotiate the terms of his deal so he can go back to being young, so he suggests that his Driver (Owen) will race Lucifer’s driver, Bob (Trejo), from the Vegas strip out into the dessert. Winner takes all. For roughly 10 minutes, Tony Scott makes cinematic rock ‘n roll love to his camera; every image is cranked, every sound effect is juiced, every edit is sharp as a tack. His fragmented, cubist style that would be seen in future efforts like Man on Fire and Domino was being first experimented with here (and in the Amazon short Agent Orange – seek it out, it’s very cool), with overlapping subtitles, a washed-out and de-saturated color scheme, staccato editing patterns, and skewed camera angles. Beat the Devil exists primarily as a sensory blast but it’s also got a great sense of humor, probably the best sense of humor out of any of the entries in The Hire, which is why it’s my favorite of the bunch.