Mel Gibson’s brand new film Hacksaw Ridge is in cinemas this Thursday and Buzz’s Dave Griffiths chats to two of the stars of the film. Dave chats to Firass Dirani and Ben Mingay about what it was like working on a film that many are describing as one of the films of the year.
You can listen to or download our Hacksaw Ridge interviews right here.
With new Aussie cult film Musclecar about to premiere at the One Night Of Horror Film Festival Dave G caught up with the film’s director Dwayne Labbe. Dwayne chats to us about where the idea of the film came from and why he cast Jacinta Stapleton as Bambi.
You can listen to or download our Musclecar interview right here.
Legendary US death metal outfit Suffocation have just delivered their brand new album …Of The Dark Light. Dave Griffiths caught up with Derek Boyer to talk in depth about the brand new album and about the US death metal scene in general.
You can listen to or download our Suffocation interview right here.
One of the trickiest genres of film to bring to the big screen is the psychological thriller. While films like Silence Of The Lambs and Se7en have worked over the years there have also been a mountain of films that have failed so badly that audiences have found themselves laughing at times when the director was expecting they should have been cowering with fear – yes I am looking at you Taylor Lautner in Abduction.
One of the men over the past few years that has virtually made the genre his own has been director M. Night Shyamalan. Films like The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, Signs and The Village have made him a king of the genre. Therefore there was little surprise that when it was announced his latest film would star James McAvoy, the actor that most people would now as Dr. Charles Xavier from the X-Men franchise, that film lovers right around the world marked down Split as one of the must see films of 2017.
The director now sits down to chat about the film which seems to have caused controversy in Australia. While some say the film is one of the best thrillers in years others have criticised the way the film handles mental illness.
While he didn’t want the film to be so controversial Shyamalan says he did want the movie to make people think. “I wanted to take something scientific and psychological proven and keep going with it. So the first two steps have been proven and the third step was not proven but instead was a question, the question is do you believe what I am suggesting. It’s almost like a question saying ‘if you believe that you get stressed and your blood pressure goes up , do you believe that? Do you believe if I give you a pill and it’s full of sugar but I tell you it’s a cure and a portion of the population cures themselves of all diseases, do you believe that? It’s true, it’s a fact, it’s in every scientific study where the medicine is pitted against the placebo effect, so if you buy me there then I’m going to introduce you to D.I.D. where every single person believes they are who they are one hundred per cent. One personality has diabetes, one has high cholosterial, one can’t see, with each one their body and chemicals change as they get to each one, and now I have you right there so that is being debated right around the world right now… what I just said. I believe that is a fact but it is still being debated. Now I’m going to ask one more question… one that hasn’t been asked before – what if somebody with D.I.D. thought that one of their personalities was supernatural? Would they have supernatural powers – that’s the question that I’m asking.”
One of the hardest decisions that Shyamalan had to make when putting Split together was to work out which actor could actually play a role that demanded almost ten different personalities and he is quick to admit that McAvoy had questions about the films as well. “I sent him the script and he said ‘well what is the name of the character that I am playing so I don’t get confused,’” he explains. “So I said I can’t tell you that, just read the script and he was like… WHAT??? He didn’t understand what I was saying because he was looking at the different characters in the script and saying ‘I’m playing this, I’m playing this.’ But I think in the script the first character is called The Neat Freak so I said you are The Neat Freak but just keep reading and so I think he was thinking that it would be a hoot and I don’t think he really concentrated on the possible pitfalls. I think he just thought it was so whacked and crazy, but he is up for anything so he was thinking this is great, it’s normal let’s just have some fun.”
“He was yes right away when he read it,” says Shyamalan nodding. “ He was reading it and saying this script is crazy and he was like ‘hell let’s do it.’ He was up to do something so exposing and so demanding that he was just like ‘yeah let’s do it.’ I was shocked and I was thinking does he understand what I’m going to ask him to do in this piece and he did but he is so fearless, I mean I have never worked with an actor that is so fearless. I ask him to do something and he is always asking to go further. So I would say to him there is a fine line when you are playing Hedwig, you are not playing a dumb adult, that’s not how most people would play the part, they wouldn’t play it as a child, you are playing a very smart child who just doesn’t have life experience. Hedwig is very smart, he is very smart he just happens to be ten…. he is a very smart ten year old. So whenever he was playing it I would so ‘no you are playing a dumb adult, that was a dumb adult and that is not what we are doing… super smart ten year old. Use your eyes you are a super smart ten year old, you don’t know what that gesture means that you just did, you don’t know what she just did, was that flirting? Is that what they call flirting? Just think through it, don’t be an idiot. Just walk to her because that creates humour and you aren’t equipped for these things. SO it’s great to be able to talk like that and be able to work through each character and make them each the hero of their own story.”
It is easy to see how proud of McAvoy’s work Shyamalan is and he continues to prasie his leading man. “We got into that wonderful rhythm where the things that were sacred to me weren’t touched and were only heightened and then he would bring this incredible new aspect to the table, which is what you dream of when you are a writer/director. When what you imagine is being honoured but enhanced. James’ physicality is the great X-factor of the movie you know – how he can carry himself as Patricia or how he literally thinks he has shrunk three inches when he is playing Hedwig or he gets very stiff and strong when he is playing Dennis.”
Split is now screening in cinemas.
Recently signed to Nuclear Blast and about to drop their new album, Desolation, on June 22nd, we caught up with doom merchants Khemmis all the way from Denver, Colorado. Dave G chats to the band about what inspired them with this new album and finds out what it would take to get the band to Australia.
You can listen to our full Khemmis interview below.
Finnish hard rockers Brother Firetribe are back with a brand new album titled Sunbound. Dave G sat down with frontman Pekka Heino to find out about some of the more heartfelt aspects of the album and we ask whether there is any chance of the band touring Australia any time soon.
You can listen to or download our Brother Firetribe interview right here.
We recently caught up with Gold Coast based Hip Hop artist Emersxn Louis to chat about his new single, studio essentials and much more!
Hi Emersxn Louis! Please tell us a bit about yourself?
Hi Buzz! I’m a Hip Hop/Rap Artist and I reside in Gold Coast Australia, I started learning how to engineer music when I was about 16, and then late 2018 I started to release music on Soundcloud, and eventually my debut Single ‘Light up the Night’ on mainstream outlets in 2019. Since then I’ve dropped 3 new tracks. With the latest being ‘Playboy Type’My father played NRL most of his life so he wanted to make sure I carried out his legacy in some way you could say, so I spent most my life playing Rugby League and signed my first contract with Titans when I was 14, and my second contract with Brisbane Broncos when I was 17, but a few weeks after my 18th birthday I made the choice to leave the game and focus on my music. So here I am, chasing the dream.
Congrats on the release of your new single PLAYBOY TYPE! What inspired the song?
‘Playboy Type’, details an illicit trip I endured that acted as an epiphany of sorts.
How long have you been creating music?
I started learning to record and mix music when I was 16, so about 5 years.
How have your hardships influenced your songwriting?
My hardships are the reason I found music and also the reason I started to make it for others. I was always that kid that felt like I had so much to say but didn’t quite know how to get it across, I always felt like I wasn’t heard, and when I was my ideas or perspectives were just overlooked or laughed at. I understood I had a different way of approaching daily life but I didn’t think that had to be a bad thing. So I decided to start making music, and people started to listen.
What is your proudest moment as an artist?
My proudest moment (so far) is dropping my first ever song, which was a cover on Young Thugs ‘Power’ it has now been removed from YouTube and Soundcloud for obvious reasons haha, but it was definitely my proudest moment.
What are 3 items you can’t live without when in the studio?
Weed, water, and my phone.
Who are your favourite Australian Hip Hop artists?
My favourite Australian Hip Hop/Rap Artists at the moment are Eric Saunders, OneFour & Youngn Lipz.
Who are your biggest musical influences?
50 Cent, A$AP Mob, Mobb Deep, Bun B, Young Thug, Kendrick Lamar, Schoolboy Q and Flatbush Zombies.
Do you plan to tour anytime soon?
No Tour planned, yet. We’re waiting to see how this whole pandemic thing pans out, then we’ll start making moves.
What is next for Emersxn Louis?
To keep working on my craft and making it better and better each day so that every listener can relate in some way. I’m putting together an Album as well, which I plan to release very soon. And I might start looking at doing some underground shows in the back streets of Gold Coast and Brisbane, we gotta start making some more noise down under. We already got the culture we just need the world to acknowledge it.
You can stream Emersxn’s new single PLAYBOY TYPE on all major online stores.
With brand new comedy web-series Sexy Herpes setting Youtube alight Dave G caught up with one of the series’ co-creators Daniel Mulvihill. Dan tells us how the show came to being and how they went about putting together such a great cast.
You can listen to or download our Sexy Herpes interview right here.
Aussie actor Shane Jacobson has put together a very speical comedy feature film called That’s Not My Dog which shows in cinemas this weekend only. Dave Griffiths chats to Shane about how the idea came together for the film and also about how the art of telling a good joke seems to be dying.
Listen to “That’s Not By Dog – Shane Jacobson Interview” on Spreaker.
Over the years Christopher Nolan has made a name for himself as one of the finest directors of the modern era. He has been nominated for three Oscars over the years and has been the man at the helm of critically acclaimed movies such as Memento, The Dark Knight Trilogy, Inception and Interstellar.
Now Nolan’s work returns to the big screen in a way that we haven’t seen before. Dunkirk is a movie that critics are saying is not just a film – it’s an experience unto itself – a work of art if you like. Somehow Nolan has taken veteran actors like Tom Hardy and Mark Rylance and mixed them with newcomers like Harry Styles and Fionn Whitehead and the end result is one of the most visually spectacular war films you are ever likely to see.
It doesn’t take long listening to Nolan talk about Dunkirk to realise that this is a film that he was passionate about, due to the subject matter, from the very beginning. “Well as for most British people the story of Dunkirk is something that we grow up with,” he explains. “I can’t even remember the time I was first told about the events of Dunkirk. As a storyteller you are always looking for gaps in the culture or in the cultural record – stories that should have been made into modern films and haven’t been and Dunkirk is certainly one of those. I think it is one of the great stories of human history and it hasn’t been addressed in modern films until now. People of Britain talk about the Dunkirk spirit and I think the residence of the story is different for different people but at the heart is community heroism in the face of adversity. It is not so much a story about individual heroics as it is a story about a community effort. It’s about how as a society, as a group of people we can achieve so much more than we can individually.”
One of the aspects that has wowed critics about Dunkirk is how Nolan has managed to weave the stories of the land, air and sea at Dunkirk together so brilliantly well and he says that he wanted to do that but keep an intensity throughout the film. “I wanted to do that but to have an intensity,” he says. “Dunkirk is a survival story and it is a story about 400,000 men trapped on a beach with the enemy moving in on them from all sides. It is a story about a desperate time, they had to get these guys back home, and I wanted to put the audience on the beach with these guys, and put the audience in the cockpit of a Spitfire battling the enemy in the air and I wanted to put them in a small boat heading over to help these guys. So to do that I decided to tell the story with intensity but with subjectivity and from three different points of view. Over the course of the story they all braid together and you get a more coherent look at the bigger picture of Dunkirk.”
Nolan also goes in depth into how he achieved the feat of shooting this film with very limited CGI. “What we did was try to shoot in camera as much as possible,” he says. “That way we could do as much for real as we could. We want the film to feel tactile and physical and authentic. We want it to play in the present tense so the audience feels like they are there and there is no screen between them and the events of the past. To do that I felt very strongly that we shouldn’t use too much special effects so we tried to do as much in camera as possible by sourcing real planes from the era, real boats and putting the actors into as much closeness of the reality as possible. At least in a way that we could do it that was still safe.”
Part of the idea for making Dunkirk was planted in Nolan’s mind when he made a crossing of the channel himself. “I made the crossing with Emma (Thomas – the producer of Dunkirk) and a friend of mine who owned a small boat,” he explains. “We made the crossing to Dunkirk at about the same time of year that the evacuation had taken place and it was far more difficult than any of us had expected. The channel really did not co-operate, the seas were very rough and it took a very long time, something like nineteen hours, for us to get over there, so the difficulty and the fear of that without people dropping bombs on us, and the feat of that without there being a war zone at the end of the journey, that experience really cemented to me an admiration for the people that took part in the real evacuation. That really was the driving force behind why I wanted to make this film.”
During the filming of Dunkirk there were leaked reports of weather creating havoc for the crew while they filmed at Dunkirk and Nolan was only too happy to tell us all about that. “Filming at the actual location seemed like the best way to get close to the truth,” Nolan says. “When you walk that beach , we walked it a lot, you feel the history there. We had to re-build huge sections of The Mole, which is this big structure that spans out into the sea. There were men essentially trapped on it, and that re-creation of history poses a lot of logistical challenges but ultimately to be able to re-stage these events with historical accuracy felt like an important part of what we were trying to do and gave us a good basis to the making of the film.”
Dunkirk is in Australian cinemas right now.