Denis Villeneuve talks with us about making Dune and watching Lawrence of Arabia in a theater all alone; Andrew Dominik addresses Blonde speculation; Michael Mann has two big projects coming; details on a summer comeback for MoviePass. All in today’s Movie News Rundown.
Update: This piece has been revised to reflect some confusion around the Andrew Dominik item.
Denis Villeneuve: We had the honor of speaking with the Dune director days after the film earned 10 Oscar nominations, including for Best Picture. Our favorite part is hearing him talk about the interconnected shots in Dune, “trying to create a melody” in the story, and watching Lawrence of Arabia in an empty theater when no one else showed up. Watch:
Also: If you prefer listening to things and not watching them, you can also check this out on our podcast on Spotify or Apple or Repod.
What’s Repod?: It’s a new podcast app where you can listen to your favorite podcasts, interact with the hosts, make suggestions, tell us what guests we should book and what we should ask them, and get and give podcast recommendations. We like it! MovieMaker‘s Tim Molloy is on there as tmolloy10.
It’s Super Bowl Weekend: While this might not seem explicitly movie-related (Go Bengals!), actually it is because the big game has always been a great opportunity for studios to drop trailers for their big franchises. First up is Amazon’s Lord of the Rings series, which Variety says will get its first teaser trailer on Sunday.
MoviePass Plots Its Return: Everyone’s favorite theater subscription service is eyeing a summer 2022 comeback and IndieWire has the details. “Definitely don’t expect to get an all-you-can-watch plan for $9.99,” IndieWire sadly relays from a presentation yesterday from co-founder Stacy Spikes. Instead Spikes teased a “tiered model,” which would presumably separate the avid moviegoer from the more casual fan. “The new MoviePass will allow users to bring a friend, roll over unused credits, transact with virtual currency, and trade unused credits.” That sounds cool.
In The Interim: The MoviePass-like AMC Stubs A-List has continued strong since ramping up its services to compete directly with MoviePass a few years back. And streaming service MUBI even launched its own smaller New York City-only version, MUBI GO, late last year. Personally, I could never get behind Stubs A-List even though there are a million AMCs in Los Angeles and their screen and sound quality is consistently high. I just prefer the ability to go to different theaters whenever I so choose, which was a major perk of the original MoviePass.
Michael Mann Wins This Week: Outside of Oscar nominees, who else could it be? On Monday, Deadline reported an April release date for Tokyo Vice. The HBO Max series stars Ansel Elgort as an American reporter working the vice beat for the largest newspaper in Japan. I strongly recommended the non-fiction book in a previous rundown. Mann directed the pilot and is an executive producer along with Tokyo Vice author Jake Adelstein. The idea of Mann bringing his breathtaking digital cinematography — usually reserved for Los Angeles — to Tokyo is too much to imagine.
When: “The series will premiere with three episodes on Thursday, April 7, followed by two episodes airing every Thursday until the season finale on April 28,” Deadline says.
Then on Wednesday: Ferrari, a “passion project,” for Mann was greenlit with an all-star cast of Adam Driver, Penélope Cruz and Shailene Woodley, Deadline reports.
Driver will play Enzo Ferrari: In his second role as a famous Italian public figure in as many years, after portraying Maurizio Gucci in Ridley Scott’s House of Gucci. I look forward to his imminent casting as Leonardo da Vinci from another American master moviemaker.
Ferrari Logline: “The movie, which Mann has been working on for two decades, is set during the summer of 1957. Ex-racecar driver, Ferrari, is in crisis. Bankruptcy stalks the company he and his wife, Laura, built from nothing ten years earlier. Their tempestuous marriage struggles with the mourning for one son and the acknowledgement of another. He decides to counter his losses by rolling the dice on one race – 1,000 miles across Italy, the iconic Mille Miglia,” Deadline says.
We’re In: You had us me at Michael Mann, but the rest of those details certainly don’t hurt.
The Idea of Mann: bringing his breathtaking digital cinematography — usually reserved for Los Angeles — to Italy… You get the picture.
Marilyn Monroe: Director Andrew Dominik tells ScreenDaily that he hopes the Marilyn Monroe biopic Blonde, starring Ana de Armas, will compete out of competition at Cannes. ScreenDaily also writes: “Dominik was bullish in the face of the reported NC-17 rating in the U.S. for Blonde, which he described as ‘a bunch of horseshit.'” And it quotes him as saying: “It’s a demanding movie… If the audience doesn’t like it, that’s the fucking audience’s problem. It’s not running for public office.” He’s further quoted as saying, “It’s an NC-17 movie about Marilyn Monroe, it’s kind of what you want, right? … I want to go and see the NC-17 version of the Marilyn Monroe story.”
Yes, This Is Kind of Confusing: If he believes the film will get an NC-17 rating in the U.S., why are the reports of the NC-17 rating “a bunch of horseshit?” Is he saying the rating itself would be “a bunch of horseshit”? Or that there was an error in the early reports? We’re reaching out to his reps to clarify.
What About That Scene?: “Rumours of a scene featuring bloody menstrual cunnilingus are untrue and ‘hilarious’ according to the director,” ScreenDaily says. The full interview lands tomorrow, and based on the quality of these (and more) quotes from the always-candid Dominik, it’ll be a surefire must-read.
Main image: Michael Mann at the 2009 premiere of Public Enemies. Photos Paul Smith / Featureflash / Shutterstock.
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