Sometimes the angle of a feature changes as you go along, and work goes unused. That was the case with Empire‘s coverage of Thomas Vinterberg’s new adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd. I visited the Buckinghamshire set in the autumn of 2013, watched some filming and interviewed Vinterberg, Carey Mulligan and Michael… Continue reading Far From the Madding Crowd
This is another feature co-written with my colleague and pal Phil De Semlyen. It’s a guide to the ‘From Hell’ thriller subgenre: those films in which a character obsessively infiltrates someone else’s life – think Fatal Attraction (the one night stand from Hell), Single White Female (the roommate from Hell), The Hand That Rocks the Cradle… Continue reading From Hell
I flew to LA, interviewed James Wan, Vin Diesel and co., and wrote the main feature in Empire‘s print magazine for the release of the behemoth Fast & Furious 7. Part of that was a little side-bar about the best stunts in the series’ first six films, and that bit got ported online. You have… Continue reading Fast & Furious 7
Another in my sporadic series of interviews with indie horror directors. This one’s with Alfonso Gomez-Rejon, regarding his clever remake of The Town That Dreaded Sundown. Originally published on the Empire website. Released in 1976, Charles B. Pierce’s The Town That Dreaded Sundown is an unusual period-set slasher movie, loosely based on real events… Continue reading The Town That Dreaded Sundown
A feature on the art of foley editing: creating artificial sounds in the studio. In which we discover that the noise the Ringwraiths make in Lord of the Rings is actually sourced from plastic cups, and that the watermelon smashing in Berberian Sound Studio isn’t actually watermelon smashing, because smashing watermelons doesn’t sound enough like… Continue reading Foley Sound Effects
This is an overview of the complete Ringu / Ring series so far, to coincide with the announcement of a third American instalment by director F. Javier Gutiérrez. It’s all a more complicated business than you might realise… http://www.empireonline.com/features/history-of-The-Ring
The release of the documentary Altman was the excuse for me and Phil De Semlyen to put together this quick introductory guide to the great director. The intention was a sort of ‘Robert Altman for Beginners’, deliberately including a couple of his less-than-stellar works. But then, annoyingly, it was published with the strapline ‘the great… Continue reading Robert Altman
