STACK #156 Oct 2017

CINEMA FEATURE

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The ball is in Oscar-winner Emma Stone's court as tennis champion Billie Jean King, playing a pivotal match for women's rights. Words Gill Pringle BILLIE JEAN WILL NOT ROLL OVER

tennis player. From the start, she knew she was fighting for something bigger than herself,” she explains. Despite the almost half century age gap between Stone and King, the two women share an easy rapport and a hope that the principles behind Battle of the Sexes , the movie, remain just as relevant today as the original match was 44 years earlier when all kinds of walls – race, gender, religion and sexual orientation – were just starting to tumble and King was at the forefront of that tidal change. “I’d never played a real person before, much less someone like Billie Jean,” muses Stone. “So when I met her and her partner for the first time, they were so welcoming to me. Billie Jean made it very clear that she would be open to whatever process I needed to go through in order to bring this whole thing to fruition, so we threw some balls around on a tennis court and I quickly realised that I wanted to watch a lot of footage from that time period and read about her then because she is so fully formed today and is able to talk all about this now with closure and hindsight than she was able to aged 29.”

E mma Stone set the bar high after collecting this year’s Best Actress Oscar for La La Land . But Damien Chazelle’s musical confection was a work of fiction – for her next role she would need to do justice to tennis legend Billie Jean King, not only a Grand Slam champion but a trailblazer for women's rights. Battle of the Sexes would be a game changer for Stone, portraying the woman who, in 1973, inspired millions of women and girls when she defeated Bobby Riggs 6-4, 6-3, 6-3 in one of the greatest landmark tennis events of all time – the Battle of the Sexes. Riggs, a self-styled chauvinist pig and one of the world’s top ranking tennis pros in the 1940s, swore that no woman could beat him. But he was yet to meet his match in Ms. King. “There’s so much that the public didn’t see at that time; so much that was happening for Billie Jean internally,” says Stone when STACK meets with her and King in Los Angeles, referring to how society, at that time, dictated King hide her sexual identity. Wed to college sweetheart Larry King for much

of her professional career, Billie Jean was forced to deny her feelings towards women before becoming the first prominent professional female athlete to come out as a lesbian in 1981. President Obama would honour King with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009 for her work advocating for women's rights and the LGBT community. Stone believes King was propelled by a force even greater than becoming No.1. “From an early age, I think Billie Jean was driven by these larger ideas of affecting change in the world. You have to remember it was looked down upon for a woman to even be an athlete when she was young – especially an aggressive women’s

Battle of the Sexes is in cinemas now

REMOTE CONTROL For the survival drama The Mountain Between Us , director Hany Abu-Assad insisted stars Kate Winslet and Idris Elba experience the harsh reality of a mountain environment. Words Gill Pringle

don’t like the cold? Director Hany Abu-Assad insisted on his cast getting real, shooting the film in the snow-covered mountains of British Columbia outside Vancouver in Canada. Not that Winslet complained. “I think you can tell if something is green-screened and doing it for real had such an impact on our characters and the truth of the story. We really are at 10,000 ft and we really were freezing cold and it was very difficult,” says the actress, speaking at the Toronto International Film Festival. “I’d never done anything like this before in terms of altitude. Running at altitude is absolute agony and makes your chest burn. It’s so horrible and it was the one thing about this film that I handled badly. I‘m a fit, strong person but I wasn’t prepared for

that at all,” she admits, also adding that, should she ever be stranded on a mountain top, she would not chose Elba as her mate. “I’m pretty resourceful actually and I know how to build a fire, but Idris is rubbish.” Shamed into improving his survival skills, Elba laughs, “If I could choose anyone to go down with in a plane, it would be Kate. Yes man.” Clearly a fan of Canada, Elba even debuted his new girlfriend, former Miss Vancouver Sabrina Dhowre, on the TIFF red carpet. “We made this film in Canada with Canadians and we did not want to go home,” says the actor, who had more reason than most to linger in Vancouver. Spending almost every day of the 60-day shoot together, the co-stars learned to keep their distance while off-set. “We did have days where we would purposefully leave each other alone. It was like a relationship – you have to give each other space,” says Winslet.

B ased on Charles Martin’s best-selling romance, The Mountain Between Us begins one stormy night as two strangers await a flight from Salt Lake City airport. Ashley Knox is a successful photographer heading east for her wedding the next day, while neurosurgeon Dr. Ben Payne is flying to Baltimore for life-saving surgeries. After chartering a small aircraft together, their pilot suffers a heart attack and the plane crashes. The two strangers must then forge a connection to survive the extreme elements of a remote, snow-covered mountain. As the couple, Kate Winslet and Idris Elba have enough heat to melt the snow, although they will need more than chemistry as they realise

no-one is coming to rescue them, and embark on a perilous journey across the wilderness. Winslet and Elba might seem like a couple made in movie heaven, but this might have been a very different film – originally set to co-star Michael Fassbender and Margot Robbie until both had scheduling conflicts, and later replaced by Rosamund Pike and Charlie Hunnam who likewise eventually dropped out. Perhaps they

The Mountain Between Us is in cinemas on October 12

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