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Diving into a rescue operation with THIRTEEN LIVES

29 Friday Jul 2022

Posted by cinepam in Reviews

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Colin Farrell, Joel Edgerton, Ron Howard, Thirteen Lives, Viggo Mortensen

(L to R) Colin Farrell as John Volanthen, Joel Edgerton as Harry Harris and Viggo Mortensen as Rick Stanton in THIRTEEN LIVES, directed by Ron Howard, a Metro Goldwyn Mayer Pictures film. Credit: Vince Valitutti / Metro Goldwyn Mayer Pictures © 2022 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Ron Howard bounces back from the disaster of Hillbilly Elegywith this tense, involving drama that re-enacts the 2018 rescue of a dozen youths and their coach from a flooded Thai cave. With the focus on some of those most involved in the effort to save the stranded thirteen before a monsoon would certainly drown them as well as the challenges the cave presented, Howard provides an entertaining drama that illuminates the event and acts as kind of a companion piece to Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi’s award-winning documentary, The Rescue.

Howard quickly sketches the start of the disaster. On June 23,2018, the boys, aged 11-16, members of the Wild Boars youth football team, and a 25-year-old assistant coach entered the Tham Luang Nang Non cave complex, 6.2 miles long and full of tunnels and narrow passages. With monsoon season still a few weeks off, it should have been an uneventful adventure but the rains came, trapping them.

As the story spirals into a global news event, would-be rescuers spring into action. There are practical matters: No one knows where the group is within the labyrinth of tunnels. Water has to be diverted from the mountain to keep from further flooding the cavern. There are also political considerations: The region’s governor (Sahajak Boonthanakit) notes that his stay in office has been extended – in the event lives are lost and there is a need to place blame. The film also capture the circus-like atmosphere that such a story engenders: news crews and reporters jostling one another for stories and space, that families in a fish bowl as they await the fates of their loved ones, the crowds of curious onlookers.

Teeradon ‘James’ Supapunpinyo as Coach Ek in THIRTEEN LIVES, directed by Ron Howard, a Metro Goldwyn Mayer Pictures film. Credit: Vince Valitutti / Metro Goldwyn Mayer Pictures © 2022 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Though the trapped youths attracted would-be rescuers from around the world, including Elon Musk, whose idea of conducting an operation using a miniature submarine was deemed unworkable, Thirteen Lives settles on mainly two groups: Thai Navy SEALS, who are challenged by murky waters that made visibility near zero, and a group of cave divers, led by two Brits, a retired fireman, Rick Stanton (Viggo Mortensen), and an IT specialist who is the father of a young son, John Volanthen (Colin Farrell). Three others join them, Jason Mallinson (Paul Gleeson), Chris Jewell (Tom Bateman), and an Australian doctor, Harry Harris (Joel Edgerton). Stanton, the cynic, is not even sure rescue is possible – but like everyone else, he is not willing to surrender to the seeming inevitable.

What Howard does exceptionally well, aided by cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom and production designer Molly Hughes and her team, who designed the facsimile of the real cave, is show us the conditions facing the rescuers: the lack of visibility, the narrowness of some of the passages, and the way the cave system snakes off in different directions. On the screen, Howard marks off distances in meters, another indication of the challenge in getting any of those trapped out alive.

This is one of those historical dramas where unless you have lived your life under a rock or off the grid, you know how the story ends. The pleasure in the film is watching, step by step, how the tale reached its famous conclusion. Acting by the international catch is top-notch, double Oscar nominee William Nicholson’s (Shadlowlands, Gladiator) script finds the intensity in even tiny details, and what the film lacks in suspense from the foregone conclusion it makes up for in tension by its immersion in the divers’ experiences and decisions. Thirteen Livesis old-fashioned, grand entertainment, and that is Howard’s strength as a filmmaker. –Pam Grady

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Edgerton fills in the contours of a BOY ERASED

01 Thursday Nov 2018

Posted by cinepam in Interviews

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Boy Erased, Garrard Conley, Joel Edgerton, Kinky Boots, Loving, Lucas Hedges, Nicole Kidman, Russell Crowe, The Gift, The Square

BOY ERASED

Flying Air Canada to the 2018 Toronto International Film Festival where Joel Edgerton’s second directorial effort Boy Erased was screening, two of the Australian actor/filmmaker’s movies were available to view on the airline’s entertainment system. If last year’s thriller Red Sparrow represents the more mainstream facet of his Hollywood career, 2005’s Kinky Boots, in which lives are changed when drag queen Lola (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and her designs come to the rescue of Charlie’s (Edgerton) failing Northampton shoe factory, reflects more the impulse that led Edgerton to Boy Erased.

“It funny, I was asked by Steve Pateman, the real Kinky Boots guy, he’s written a book and asked me to write a quote for it,” Edgerton says. “I thought about it and I ended up talking about how beautiful that film is, how it’s such a mad, extravagant collision of separate worlds, which we have in Boy Erased, too, straight and gay, Southern and New York, and just a general contradiction of ideas. Kinky Boots, really, at its core, is about people accepting other people. It’s not about the madness of drag shows. It’s not about industry. Those are all sub-themes. The big macro is, ‘You’re different from me. I’m different from you. So, what?’”

Boy Erased, which Edgerton adapted from Garrard Conley’s memoir, stars Lucas Hedges as Jared, an Arkansas college student sent to gay conversion therapy by his Baptist preacher father, Marshall (Russell Crowe), and mother, Nancy (Nicole Kidman), after he’s outed to them. It was 2016’s Loving, in which Edgerton played one half of the couple at the heart of the 1967 Supreme Court case that struck down laws banning interracial marriage, that set him on the path to Boy Erased.

“Loving is definitely why I got involved with this film,” he says. “I think it plucked the same nerves in me. It agitated the same feeling that Loving did in terms of people or a person unable to live a normal life like everybody else, because there is some quality of difference or minority difference that means they get treated differently.

“Garrard’s memoir is not just about the madness of an institution,” he adds. “The book is about the chaos and madness of a family dealing with something that shouldn’t necessarily need to create any drama and yet all this stuff happened, all this energy was output and all of this pain was created.”

Edgerton, 44, grew up in Dural, a small suburb of Sydney, and doesn’t remember any of the kids his age coming out as gay while they lived under their parents’ roofs. The kind of attitudes that lead people to seek gay conversion therapy is strong, he feels, all over the planet. But to get to the heart of Jared’s story, he relied on Conley to act as his guide into an unfamiliar world.

“Garrard was my porthole to everything that he experienced,” Edgerton says. “He was my access to other survivors of conversion therapy. He was my access to his mother and father, Herschel and Martha, who were gracious to invite me to dine at their house, to attend church. He was my porthole to John Schmidt [the head of the therapy center], who I play in the movie, on whom I based my character. I felt more a passenger of Garrard’s story as I was making the movie. He was my navigator. It was really about that. And getting access to that Baptist world was about literally going to Herschel’s church and doing a lot of research. I did a lot of research about ideas – I think during the production I had six different Bibles dotted throughout my apartment.”

BOY ERASED

Edgerton wanted to paint as detailed a picture of the world he was depicted as possible without judgment. He didn’t want a movie with obvious heroes and villains. Jared’s parents, the church elders his father goes to for advice, the people at the center, they mean well—and that’s what’s so chilling.

“I think there’s something more insidious and terrifying about being in a situation where everybody is, ‘We’re just here to help,’” Edgerton says. “That’s hard to sidestep and also because you don’t have all the information and you’re naïve going in, like Garrard was. If somebody told you there was a 84% success rate and that your sexuality, which was plaguing you during your waking hours and threatening your freedom within your community, if somebody told you that could all just be turned around, wouldn’t you sign on the dotted line, too? Who would want that if living in your community could become terrifying, and hell, you could be beaten and ostracized?

“And you’d have to go somewhere else,” he adds. “There are a lot of young people in the world who find the agency to say, ‘I do not accept that you will not accept me, and therefore, I will go and do something else, even if that means cutting family away.’ But Garrard represents, to me, the majority, because I’m like him, as in I didn’t have an agency that would have powered this rebellious, renegade, forge-my-own-path mentality. I was very much under the spell of my parents. I think most of us are rule keepers.”

On the surface, Boy Erased is a different kind of project for Edgerton. A prolific screenwriter, most of his work, including the script for his brother Nash’s 2008 thriller, The Square, and his own directing debut, 2015’s psychological thriller, The Gift, has been genre-based. For this, Edgerton had to step outside that comfort zone, but as he worked on his screenplay, he discovered that even in adapting a memoir, certain genre rules still applied.

“It was sort of just about applying it to a more dramatic scenario without the hand holds of genre,” says Edgerton. “Yet, I wanted it to have a pinch of genre feeling of suspense and the potential for danger and the tension that comes out of real life. You don’t know what’s around the corner for Jared when the men gather in the kitchen to decide his fate. What’s going to happen to him? The sense of suspense in moments like that.

“On this film, when I wrote it, I became a little possessed. I just felt, once I started writing, it came pouring out of me. Thankfully, Garrard had laid the foundation, because he lived the life and he was brave enough to talk about it. Then I felt the privilege of just being able to really just take his clay and reshape it into something else, turn it from words on page onto other worlds on a page that would allow it to become a visual thing. It felt like it wrote itself pretty easily.” –Pam Grady

To read more about Boy Erased, check out my interview with Lucas Hedges in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Joel Edgerton will be at San Francisco Embarcadero Center Cinema on Sunday, Nov. 4, to take part in Q&As after the 2 and 2:30pm screenings of Boy Erased.

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First trailer: LOVING

12 Tuesday Jul 2016

Posted by cinepam in News

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Jeff Nichols, Joel Edgerton, Loving, Loving v. Virginia, Ruth Negga, US Supreme Court

So looking forward to Jeff Nichols’ latest, starring Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga and acclaimed at Cannes. It’s the flesh-and-blood story of Richard and Mildred Loving, the plaintiffs in Loving v. Virginia, whose mixed-race marriage made them criminals in the eyes of their home state. This was the case that went to the Supreme Court in 1967 and ended with the ruling that invalidated laws against interracial marriage nationwide. — Pam Grady

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On Marriage and Mystery: Joel Edgerton and Felicity Price WISH YOU WERE HERE

07 Friday Jun 2013

Posted by cinepam in Interviews

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Blue-Tongue Films, Felicity Price, Joel Edgerton, Kieran Darcy-Smith, Wish You Were Here

wish you were hereOutside the window, white flakes keep falling, a snow day at the Sundance Film Festival, but inside this bar on Main Street, actor Joel Edgerton and screenwriter/actress Felicity Price’s thoughts are on Cambodia and their home base Australia, the locations of Wish You Were Here. Directed by Kieran Darcy-Smith, Edgerton’s friend and partner in the Blue-Tongue Films collective and Price’s husband and co-writer, the film is a hybrid of mystery and melodrama kicked into gear when long-married couple Dave (Edgerton) and Alice’s (Price) Southeast Asian holiday takes an ominous turn.

“I tell you what is weird: playing the husband of one of your best friends’ real-life wife in a movie. That was weird,” says Edgerton. “He was just watching us on the monitor. We didn’t have to do any serious hanky panky, but there was one day when we had a bed scene. It was more about the conversation, but then it was getting kind of a little bit romantic and Kieran just didn’t yell ‘Cut!’ for the longest time.”

“He likes to keep rolling and see what might happen,” laughs Price. “Kieran was just watching as a director. He couldn’t care less how far it went. ‘I’ve got to get this take. Is the lighting right?’”

Life is no picnic for Dave and Alice, but from the outside at least, their marriage looks strong. They are the parents of two with another on the way. The vacation they share with Alice’s sister Steph (Teresa Palmer) and Steph’s boyfriend Jeremy (Antony Starr) is a happy foreign adventure that ends in disaster and sends a jolt through the couple’s relationship.

“I was thinking about writing a film kind of about growing up and having small children and having to take on the responsibility of small children and being torn,” Price says. “Finding yourself loving your family and your children, and your relationship becoming a little more long term, but yearning for a bit of freedom, a bit of partying, a bit of change. I was interested in that kind of discordance. I wanted to explore that in a relationship and how hard you have to fight for a relationship. But then I guess I wasn’t interested in just writing a relationship drama. I wanted to write a mystery thriller. So the second part of it, I mashed together a story that’s kind of based on a true story that I heard about two couples traveling to Southeast Asia.”

“It’s no idyllic Hollywood relationship,” adds Edgerton. “They’re a couple who have two kids and probably spend very little time putting care and energy into each other and more into just the day-to-day pragmatism of looking after the kids. But the relationship is solid; we wanted it to feel like they’re there to stay. Then this situation erupts and upsets their equilibrium.”

Edgerton most recently played Tom Buchanan in fellow Australian Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby. He has also found success in far from home, appearing in – among other films – Star Wars: Episodes II and III, Kinky Boots, Smokin’ Aces, Warrior, The Thing and Zero Dark Thirty. But he was happy to return to the small-budget world of Blue-Tongue Films, where the partners include, in addition to Edgerton and Darcy-Smith, Luke Doolan (the Oscar-nominated short Miracle Fish), David Michôd (Animal Kingdom), Spencer Susser (Hesher), Mirrah Foulkes (the short Dumpty Goes to the Big Smoke) and Edgerton’s older brother Nash (The Square).

“I love being home,” he says. “I love the movies we’ve been making. I just love working on good things. There was almost a scenario where I wasn’t going to be doing this film, for various reasons. I would be genuinely disappointed if I was seeing the movie at Sundance and I wasn’t in it, particularly with another actor playing my part.

“I love what we’re doing at Blue-Tongue,” he avers. “We’re very proud of that work. It’s interesting. A couple of years ago when I did Animal Kingdom, there was always that thing of, ‘Look, you can work in North America, why not keep doing that? Why go home and make smaller movies?’ But after all my years of working in L.A., Animal Kingdom, that little movie that I made back home, kind of makes the most waves out of any other thing that I’ve worked on. It set a really good precedent. I would never dream of not going home to work, particularly on anything that’s Blue-Tongue-related. When it’s good writing, you just do it.” –Pam Grady

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