Alex Proyas – Podcasting Them Softly

ALEX PROYAS: An Interview with Kent Hill

July 21, 2018 by Kent Hill, posted in Interviews

Dark City was (and is still) an incredible experience when it arrived in theatres – albeit in a form which didn’t accurately reflect the director’s vision.

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Yet the power of the film is undeniable. Thinking about it and revisiting it makes me sad in many ways. In part because original films that tell stories that are fun, entertaining and with unique complexity are few and a galaxy far, far away in between. In the age of streamlined, market-researched, great score on Rotten Tomatoes-type movies, we see few, if any, interesting tales told from personal places as opposed to a facsimile of what’s trending well at the moment.

Enter the cinema of Alex Proyas. Be it low budget or big-time-blockbuster, Alex injects his work with a very distinct style, a mastery of cinematic arts along with a passion for the story he is bringing to a theatre near you. But what I found most intriguing is that there is a price for everything in the market place. A toll which one must pay on many levels as a concept makes the arduous journey from script to screen.

Alex has fought many battles both while making the movies he wants to make, but also after the film is taken out of the camera and projected for your viewing pleasure. And, personally, I feel it is a nonsensical exercise to place hurdle after hurdle in front of the artists giving their all to satisfy themselves and we the movie-loving public. A foolish endeavor to hinder the music makers and the dreamers of the dreams – when all they seek to do is take you away from your dreary existence for an hour or two.

Filmmakers have usually already talked about, at great length, the makings of their pictures. So, as much as I love his work, I decided to talk to Alex about the state of movies in general. It is after all, always fascinating to hear the other side of the story. I’ve always been as intrigued by the mechanics of films and the men who make them, as I am with the end result.

Director Alex Proyas, actress Rose Byrne and actor Nicolas Cage attend the premiere of Knowing in New York.

It was truly an honor, as it ever is, to have a chat with an artist one admires – Alex Proyas was no exception. A great gentleman, an important filmmaker . . . my dear PTS listeners . . . I give you, Alex Proyas.

Alex Proyas’s Dark City

May 21, 2018 by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Alex Proyas’s Dark City is a radiant jewel of sci-fi beauty, madness and mystery, one of the best films of the 90’s, a testament to just what kind of world building is possible using special effects and a textbook example of deep, ponderous ideas one might explore in this area of the medium. It kind of got overshadowed by the release of The Matrix the same year (which is also masterful) and slipped through the cracks a bit, but it managed to hold on and re-emerge with a kind of cult aura around it, a reverie that prompts discussions in hushed tones and friends holding screenings for new generations who haven’t had their minds and eyes blown out of their skulls by the experience just yet. It kind of goes the Blade Runner route by fusing inky black retro noir with startling futurism, albeit less monolithic tech design and something more organic and otherworldly. In a nameless, perpetually nocturnal city, a man named Murdoch (Rufus Sewell) wakes up in a dingy apartment next to a dead hooker, with no memory of who he is or what happened. Chased all through the night by mysterious, pale gentlemen in hats and trench coats, he doesn’t so much try to clear his name as much as find out what his name actually is, and why things have gotten so strange in this city. He’s supposedly got a wife in Emma (Jennifer Connelly has never been sexier), a lounge singer who knows more than she lets on, and wily detective Frank (William Hurt, fantastic) is on his trail too. Then there’s the creepy, wheezing asthmatic Dr. Schreber (Kiefer Sutherland playing against type) who has a connection to the trench coat brigade. To give too much away would be criminal, but let’s say that the story goes to some truly mesmerizing and disturbing places that explore far beyond the topical murder mystery of the first act and shake the foundations of the world we see built, rearranged and then completely disassembled right before our eyes. At the heart of the narrative lies perhaps the biggest question ever asked by humans: what are we, where are we and what’s the reason for all this? The film blazes it’s own trail of answers to fit the story, but is no less provocative than those age old quandaries, and there’s a point in the third act (you’ll know when it happens) where the lid is blown off of what these characters think their world is, and it’s like a collective gasp from all the universe, one of the most simultaneously harrowing and tantalizing moments in cinema. Sewell plays it opaque as always, I’ve never really been able to connect with him as an actor, but because his character here has sort of a vacant, blank slate thing going on anyways, it works. Hurt has always had a questioning in his eyes while at work, a tender, inquisitive nature that’s put to the test and then some over the course of his brilliant arc. Connelly has all the stars of the galaxy in her gorgeous eyes and it’s so cool to watch her go from sidelined wife/songstress role into take no prisoners, dark angel mode as she joins the search for truth. As the impending legion of trench coats there’s a handful of varied faces including Ian Richardson, Bruce ‘Gyro Captain’ Spence and the absolutely terrifying Richard O’Brien, who goes down in history as one of the scariest villains on hand here. Director Proyas did the classic The Crow in which another atmospheric metropolis takes centre stage, the man knows how to set us right in the environment and keep eyes rooted to the screen with each and every shot. The disconcerting score by Trevor Jones is a restless jangle that puts forth auditory fragments like half remembered clues from a dream before, adding further to the atmosphere. It’s simply one of the best tales ever told on celluloid, a timeless piece of storytelling that speaks on all levels of consciousness. Oh, and remember Shell Beach.

-Nate Hill

Dark Cities, Dark Futures, Dark Caves: An Interview with Bruce Hunt by Kent Hill

May 25, 2017November 5, 2017 by Kent Hill, posted in Interviews

Young Bruce Hunt loved movies and blowing things up. This love, and learning the basics of the craft from film magazines of the period, would firmly cement in his mind the path on which he would travel. As it was said in a film that Bruce would later work on, “Fate it seems, is not without a sense of irony,” a teenage Bruce would encounter Academy Award winning special-effects artist Dennis Muren in a cafe in London.

It was Muren that would advise the dreamer to seek out an effects house in his native Australia for possible future employment and, after art school, that is what the talented Mr. Hunt would do. Working with small production houses on commercials his work would soon catch the eye of the founder of one of these companies, a man named Andrew Mason. It would be Mason, producing a film directed by Alex Proyas called Dark City, that would call on Hunt to bring his passion, and by then, professional eye for effects photography to his first big screen gig.

Work on another big flick would follow, as Mason would again tap Bruce and bring him to work on the Wachowski’s cinematic masterpiece The Matrix. There would be work on the film’s sequels before, at last, Bruce would sit in the director’s chair for The Cave, an adventure in deep terror. He would emerge from the darkness to work on Baz Luhrmann’s Australia only to descend again soon after for Guillermo del Toro’s Don’t be afraid of the Dark.

Through it all his love of the movies continues to drive him and, as you will hear, he has plans to get his visions back on that big screen, just as soon as he can. It was great to sit down with Bruce. Not only is he a filmmaker I admire, but it was great to just talk about movies with him.

If you don’t know his work then now is the time to check it out. But, if you already have and you’re a fan like me – then kick back and enjoy.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you my good mate . . . Bruce Hunt