STACK NZ June 2016 Issue 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.
visit EXTRAS NEWS
08 JUNE 2016
EXTRAS 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
crazy it is, but fact outstrips fiction.”
So has he also heard of criminals
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
Triple 9 is out on DVD and Blu-ay on June 8
Visit for the full interview
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
CLOONEY DUMBSTRUCK
BY THE COEN BROTHERS
Director John Hillcoat talks Triple 9.
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
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.
Hail Caesar! is out
on DVD and Blu-ray on
July 29.