Jonathan Crocker

Did he break your concentration? SLJ talks swearing, Scarlett and The Spirit….

Is it true you became an actor to get the drugs and girls?

In the beginning? Oh yeah, man. It was all about the chicks, the drugs and the applause. The artistic appreciation comes later. It’s just something about being a young actor. Girls were like, ‘Oh my God, you’re so good in the play.’ I was like, ‘Really? You like me?’ Read the rest of this entry »

What do you get if you cross a Norse god-king with an ego the size of a planet, a nervy science boffin with gigantic anger issues, a WWII super-soldier with a very silly costume and a genius billionaire playboy with flying power-armour? Arguments, that’s what.

With great power comes great banter in writer/director Joss Whedon’s blockbuster multiplier, which isn’t the best superhero movie ever – but might well be the funniest. Read the rest of this entry »

Is Woody Allen a hero of yours?

Yes, he’s an idol. For sure. Maybe, one of my few.

Woody has a lot of female muses. Do you?

I think my only muse is my mother. Her voice is the most accessible to me in my life. I can hear her screaming at me many times during the day. ‘LARRY! PUT A JACKET ON! WHAT ARE YOU DOING? WHAT, YOU’RE GOING OUT IN THIS, IN THIS WEATHER WITHOUT A JACKET?’ Read the rest of this entry »

Every superhero blockbuster needs a Gotta See That Again action sequence. Superman Returns had the plane hurtling towards a baseball stadium. The Dark Knight had the crash’n’smash underpass chase. Even Fantastic Four had the lorry losing a shoulder-barge with Michael Chiklis.

Aftering surprising everyone with cinema’s freshest, funniest new super-franchise, director Jon Favreau begins his sequel exactly where he started: a fatherless man hammering out an arc reactor in a dark hole in the Earth. Read the rest of this entry »

Can we ask you some questions about New York?

Try, I don’t know that much about the city. From my house, they put me in a car and I go to the editing room. I don’t see much of it except a few blocks. I don’t know anything else. I see some people go by in the street sometimes. But I’ve always been there. I was born there, I was raised there, so… Okay, okay, let’s see how we get on. Read the rest of this entry »

Just after he finished making True Lies, James Cameron picked up the phone and called Stanley Kubrick. They spend a day together watching Cameron’s film in the basement of the house in the English countryside where Kubrick was now a virtual hermit. Kubrick was fascinated by Cameron’s effects shots, wanted to know exactly how he’d hung a man on the missile of a harrier jump-jet and fired him through a skyscraper. Cameron must have been thrilled. He’d finally returned the favour. Read the rest of this entry »

Someone broke Bryan Singer’s heart. He was 16, just a boy from New Jersey. They were much older, from way out of town. He still hasn’t recovered. He still hasn’t forgotten. “Maybe because I was an only child and I was always looking for that kind of thing,” he remembers. “I was completely blown away by ET. Absolute genius…” Read the rest of this entry »

Why James Cameron’s 3-D sci-fier is the most important movie of your lifetime…

James Cameron has not made a film since Titanic. That was 1997. That was 12 years. What has he been doing? Taking the movies to another dimension. Having pioneered visual effects in The Abyss (the first photorealistic CG character), Terminator 2 (CG plus human actors) and True Lies (composite technology), Cameron is convinced the future is 3-D. And when you’re the King Of The World, you don’t wait for the future. You invent it. Read the rest of this entry »

Swapping Spaghetti for Noodles, Korean director Kim Ji-woon talks crazy saddle-saga The Good, The Bad And The Weird…

How big an influence was Sergio Leone? What are your other big influences?

I like Italian Westerns in general but it’s clear that Sergio Leone left a strong impression on me. I was inspired not only by Westerns but by films like Mad Max: Road Warrior, Ben-Hur, Bullitt, The Magnificent Seven, The Wild Bunch and Blade Runner. Read the rest of this entry »

With Tarantino remaking WWII actioner Inglourious Basterds, original director Enzo Mascarelli remembers how it all began…

Guns. Lots of guns. That was the one thing director Enzo Mascarelli didn’t have while filming WWII actioner Inglorious Bastards in 1978. “A strange law in the Italian government at the time has just decided to remove all firearms from the movies,” recalls Mascarelli. “So they took all our guns – crazy! It’s not easy to do a war movie without weapons! After they went, everyone was saying, ‘Bastards! Bastards! Bastards!’ And I just said, ‘Inglorious bastards!’ And everyone said, ‘That’s it! That’s the title of the movie!’ And these guys are just a bunch of bastards. I’m still very proud of that.” Read the rest of this entry »