STACK NZ Jun #74

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After the cannibal gore-fest The Green Inferno , Eli Roth is set to tackle a very different sort on man-eater in Meg . CLOONEY DUMBSTRUCK BY THE COEN BROTHERS

Hail Caesar! is out on DVD and Blu-ray on July 29.

Why George Clooney is always happy to play the idiot for the Coen Brothers. S et in Hollywood in the ‘50s, the Coens’ latest quirky hit Hail Caesar! boasts an all-star cast, with George Clooney playing the vain and dim Baird Whitlock, the star of the biblical epic which gives this film its name. The movie is the latest in what he affectionately calls his “idiot” roles for the siblings. But compared with the dimwits he played in O Brother, Where Art Thou? , Intolerable Cruelty and Burn After Reading , he reckons Baird is probably the dumbest character he has played for them yet. “He’s just a clueless movie star, which of course could never happen in real life, now could it?” he grins. Despite the fact that, so far, they’ve only called on him to play doofuses, Clooney willingly packs his bags whenever the Coen brothers reach out. “If you look at the greatest directors of all time, none of them were making their best films 30 years into their career. They generally made them in their early days or in the middle. But these guys are still making unbelievably great films. They will go down in the history books as among the great filmmakers.” Adam Colby

TRIGGER HAPPY “I love genre films and finding a way of reinventing them,” says expat Australian director John Hillcoat ( Lawless ). “I’d been itching to do something contemporary, urban, energetic, and like a commentary of where America is at right now. The idea of the 999 code and the rich moral complexity that it threw up was the key.” Triple 9 is a hard-edged urban crime thriller in which the titular police code for “officer down” is used as a diversion by a crew of corrupt cops and ex-Special Forces soldiers in order to pull off an impossible heist for the Russian-Israeli mob. “I’ve heard of up to 300 police officers showing up after a cop shooting in Atlanta,” he says. “And in LA, I’ve seen a whole area being shut down for a resolved shooting that’s done and dusted. If we’d had more resources we really could have shown how taking advantage of the 999 response in a similar way to the events depicted in the film? “I’m not sure whether people do deliberately use it as a diversion – maybe they will now that we’ve flagged the idea,” he laughs. Scott Hocking Director John Hillcoat talks Triple 9 . crazy it is, but fact outstrips fiction.” So has he also heard of criminals

GROWING OLD GRACEFULLY Garbage’s Marilyn Manson has no fears about being long in the tooth as the band prepares to release their new album Strange Little Birds .

EXTRAS

S inger Marilyn Manson is erudite in explaining her philosophy on being “long in the tooth”; she’s passionate about the magic of getting older, which “you can’t possibly imagine” until that happiness is yours. “Lots of young women tell me how scared they are of ageing, and it makes me feel so sad for them because then I believe that they focus on all the stuff that will determine the very opposite of what they want from getting older,” she says. “That’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you’re scared of ageing, you will age poorly. If you embrace ageing, you will be like my dad who is 80 years old and just went off to China by himself the other day and called us, his

daughters, from the Great Wall of China. That’s f-cking badass. I want to be like my dad when I grow up.” Awe and wonder are folded all the way through Strange Little Birds , which Manson and her bandmates recorded at producer icon Butch Vig’s home studio in the Hollywood Hills with the express desire to loosen the bonds of experience. “Anybody using technology today is really in danger of losing the immediacy of performance,” the vocalist says. “It’s something that really great artists, like, say Jack White, are incredibly in-depth at capturing. But we’re not all as gifted musicians, so our temptation when we get behind the console is to really fix performance. This time around, we all decided that we had to make each other feel excited in the room – if we were able to change the molecules in the room at the time, then we’d done our job, because you can translate that to an audience.” Zoë Radas

Strange Little Birds by Garbage is due out on June 10

Triple 9 is out on DVD and Blu-ay on June 8 Visit www.stack.net.nz for the full interview

JUNE 2016

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