On the eve of the mutated ninja turtles saving the world again (actually, it’s New York this time), director Kelvin Munroe talks of why The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles could not be made by Dreamworks or Pixar, and why there is no turtledove for the turtles.

words rachel mok

Kelvin, how did you get to direct the turtles?
I was in LA back then and met the people from Imagi. I heard them planning to work on the turtles and I was like, “Do you realize what the turtles could be?” I’ve been a fan since 1985 and I didn’t care if they hired me, I just wanted to give my advice. Eventually they sent me to meet the creator, as I had to get his blessing to be the director. I took my first copy of the turtles comic, which I bought in 1985, and spent the whole day with him. At the end of the day I just asked him to sign it: even if I didn’t get the job I could get his autograph. After I got back in my car I opened the comic and it said, “Dear Kelvin, make a good movie.” That’s how I found out I got the job!

As a fan of the teenage mutant ninja turtles since the early days, what do you like about them?
I like that they are a family, you don’t get that a lot in superhero teams. And they don’t have superpowers. They just train themselves really hard to have the power. When kids watch Star Wars they think maybe – just maybe – they can be Skywalker someday. They may think “Oh, I may have the power of a Jedi but I just don’t know it yet.” But no one dreams of being a Superman because they know they can’t fly. For the turtles they just practise very hard to get their power. It is really relatable to me.

Then which turtle are you?
Today I am Ralph. I like the idea that he doesn’t overly think about things, and he always knows the right thing to do. There is something noble about him. When I am directing people I am more like Ralph and Leo. But when I am with my kids, it’s Mike.
Batman, Spiderman, Wolverine… every comic hero has their dark side…
I think for the turtles, both their bright and dark sides are that they are a family. It is the source of the contentions between them – sometimes their own personalities override the fact that they are a team. But whenever someone screws up, they act together as a family.

This isn’t the first time the ninja turtles will be put on the big screen. What makes this time special?
It is the first time there is a focus on their being a family, and the characters are more real. I want the characters to be like teenage brothers: they live together and fight together. The other ninja turtles are more adventurous and action-packed with comedy elements, this time I will try to add more drama and brotherhood in the film.

Unlike other blockbuster animations, TMNT doesn’t feature big stars’ voices for the four turtles.
Right at the beginning we decided against that. The studio actually named the top four 20-something actors to be in the movie, like the guy from The OC. But it is like the Superman theory. I don’t want to see Tom Cruise playing Superman. I want to see Superman. I am very anti-Dreamworks in that regard. I hate it when the voice actors’ names are above the movie title. They are important, but no more important than the characters. So we just got four voices that can reflect the characters very well.

Why do you think this picture could not have been made by big companies like Pixar and Dreamworks?
I think if you did this movie in a big studio, it could never be as visually dark or deal so severely with the story. There is actually a scene in which Leo and Ralph fight to the point that they try to kill each other. The big studios would never push that far. For them CGI movies are only about talking animals. It is ridiculous.

So it ended up becoming a co-operation with Imagi, a Hong Kong company. How has that worked out?
I think the most difficult part of making the movie is the co-ordination between the two offices. It is a bit too much for me. But they have a great office here, I wish mine was as nice as this is (laughs). People here are really cool. They take the movie really seriously. I think only eight of the people are over 30… which is actually very scary. I was like, “Oh my God! I feel so old!”

Last question: any girls for the turtles?
Ah, you know, you can’t do that! Peter Laird (one of the creators of TMNT) got crazy about it. Some guys mentioned it before and he said, “Who would think a turtle is hot? Who would want to marry a Chihuahua?” There has actually been a female ninja turtle in a TV series but it completely ruined the franchise. Fans hated it. Peter Laird hated it. You can’t even joke about that in front of him! (laughs)

TMNT opens on March 29

Luc Besson’s first CGI movie is just one in a long line of surprises...

words rachel mok

It’s a cliché, and maybe one of the most common, but it is true that Luc Besson is a director with many faces. He has made cult classics like Subway and Nikita, the stylish yet moving Leon and the sci-fi blockbuster The Fifth Element. And now he is treading new territory with Arthur and the Minimoys, a part live action, part CGI animated film. ‘It is so good to be unexpected,” the Frenchman says, proudly.

When Besson’s friend Patrice Garcia showed him the drawings for Arthur, he fell in love with the project and knew immediately what he would do with it. Although it would be his first foray into the intricacies of CGI, he envisaged a full-length feature in which “I want audiences to believe that you can go to one world from another. You don’t see the transition. I tried to make the 3-D effect look as natural as possible.”

In the film, Arthur is a 10-year-old boy living with his grandmother, his grandfather having mysteriously disappeared. When an unscrupulous land developer buys the mortgage to their home and threatens to kick them out, Arthur decides to find a cache of rubies his grandfather had supposedly hidden and so pay off the debt. Clues to the treasure lead him to adventures in the underground land of the Minimoys, a pixie-like people with evil magician troubles of their own.

Besson worked on the film for five years before it finally made it to the screen and he sees it as much more than just a kiddies’ movie. It comments on racism, how people can overcome their differences and their difficulties and the clash between nature and civilization.

And then ironically he comments that if civilization means the advance of technology, it can be dangerous for children: it blocks their imagination. “Because we want some extra time for ourselves, we say to the kids ‘Here is a DVD, here is a video game, I allow you to watch TV for two hours,’ and we think it is okay,” says the director of movies on DVD who has several kids himself.
So is that why he has said he would only ever make 10 films in his career? And if that it so, Arthur and the Minimoys would have to be the last. Well, no – he still has a few ideas to get across – including enough about Arthur for a couple of sequels now in the pipeline. But he will give up when he no longer has anything to say. “I see so many great directors continue to film and they become less and less good. I don’t understand why they continue,’ he says. “I can easily sign five films tomorrow, make crappy movies and get rich. But you have to be honest
to yourself.”

That sounds as though, having made so many successful films in his career, investors are knocking at his door to pour money into his movies. Besson points out that is not at all the case – he had to finance Minimoys himself for the first two years. But he prefers it like that.

“It is logical. I’d rather people be that way. Just because I have made a movie or two they like doesn’t mean they should buy everything I do,” he says, having spent €65 million on the Minimoys. “I prefer that I have to earn their confidence all the time otherwise I would feel like ‘Oh by the way they buy everything I do so I can do whatever I want’, which is bad. Most of the time like that, you make your worst films.”

Mr Bean’s Holiday
Director: Steve Bendelack

A decade after the first Bean movie raked in huge bucks all over the world, Rowan Atkinson returns for the title role in Mr Bean’s Holiday. This time, the adventure starts when Mr. Bean wins a church raffle for a trip to Cannes, France, which just happens to be in the midst of the Cannes film festival. Armed with a video camera, his trademarked tweed jacket, and red tie, Mr. Bean embarks on a his usual hi-jinks and adventure, which includes him befriending a 10 year old child, getting lost and stranded in France with no money, and getting wanted for kidnapping. Fans of the original series will be glad to hear that this film is a return to form, similar to the TV series, and unlike the Americanised version of the first film.

Meet the Robinsons
Director: Steve Anderson

Meet the Robinsons is the 46th animated feature from Walt Disney Pictures. This futuristic story—set in 2037—is about a boy named Lewis with a surprising number of clever inventions to his credit. His latest and most ambitious project is the Memory Scanner, a machine that will help him find his birth mother so they can become a family. But before he can find her, his invention is stolen by a villain known simply as the Bowler Hat Guy. A mysterious stranger named Wilbur Robinson appears out of the blue to take our Lewis in a time machine and together they team up to track down Bowler Hat Guy in a light-hearted adventure. Based on the book A Day With Wilbur Robinson by William Joyce.

The Reaping
Director: Stephen Hopkins

Starring Oscars-winning Hilary Swank, The Reaping brings you to a thrilling journey… the Ten Biblical Plagues. Swank plays as a former Christian missionary who lost her faith after her family was tragically killed, and has since become a world renowned expert in disproving religious phenomena. While investigating a small Louisiana town that is suffering from what appear to be the Biblical plagues, she realizes that science cannot explain what is happening and she must regain her faith to combat the dark forces threatening the community. Produced by Joel Silver, the man behind The Matrix, Die Hard and Lethal Weapon.

Honey and Clover
Director: Masahiro Takada

Starring Oscars-winning Hilary Swank, The Reaping brings you to a thrilling journey… the Ten Biblical Plagues. Swank plays as a former Christian missionary who lost her faith after her family was tragically killed, and has since become a world renowned expert in disproving religious phenomena. While investigating a small Louisiana town that is suffering from what appear to be the Biblical plagues, she realizes that science cannot explain what is happening and she must regain her faith to combat the dark forces threatening the community. Produced by Joel Silver, the man behind The Matrix, Die Hard and Lethal Weapon.

Starring: Sean Bean, Sophia Bush, Zachary Knighton, Neal McDonough
Director: Dave Meyers
Scheduled release: March 29

As the opening frames for The Hitcher inform us, 48,000 people die each year on the road each year. I know these sorrows have a variety of causes. Somehow, I doubt being sliced up by Brits in the middle of the New Mexico desert registers in the top five.
After attempting to briefly educate us about the perils of driving, The Hitcher (a remake of the 1986 cable standby) then jumps straight into the action. A guy (Zachary Knighton) waits impatiently for his girlfriend outside her dorm with a 1970 Oldsmobile 442. As he sits by his muscle car and she (Sophia Bush) comes out with nothing but pajamas and a small backpack on, The Hitcher feels like it should turn into a Penthouse story at any moment. They hop in the car, and before we even get their names we get to see Bush changing in the car and going on the road.
I mean I know horror movies aren't really about the characters, but were the writers so lazy they couldn't even come up with a major? A college friend? Any indication of how these two know each other?
In fact, as far as I remember we don't ever find out the answers to any of those questions. The good news is that as soon as we run into the creepy sociopath (a wonderfully chilling Sean Bean), we don't really care.
They first meet him on a dark, stormy night. They're barreling down an unknown state route in the middle of the desert, he's standing in the middle of the road, and from the moment we see him, cinematographer James Hawkinson makes him look like the creepiest thing alive. She begs her boyfriend not to pick the hitcher up, and at the first of many cheaply drawn scare moments the predictable engine trouble almost prevents them from leaving the crazy man in the rain.
They escape to a gas station with the first in a long string of nameless stupid hick side characters. The hitcher has mystically managed to hop another ride to the exact same gas station, and ends up asking his way into hitching a ride.
The brief (and only) scene where they haven't figured out that he's a sociopath is about as much background as we get. We finally learn everyone's name: he's Jim, she's Grace, and the creepy Brit in the middle of the desert is John Ryder. He finds out they're on their way to spring break. Then he decides to break their cell phone and starts trying to kill them.
The amazing thing about The Hitcher is that while you can sit down and rethink its plot and realize what an empty movie it is, it's impossible to take your eyes or mind off of for long enough to let the stupidity sink in. You're soaked into the mess within a few minutes and don't get to leave until the end of the movie. Bean's sociopath is impossible to look away from, even though he's shown just slightly more often than Jaws was. Hawkinson's cinematography manages to make sun-drenched deserts creepy, and only offers brief and horrifying glimpses of the massacres.
The Hitcher is simple and suspenseful, solely because of Bean's sociopath and Hawkinson's cinematic craftsmanship. If you took them away, The Hitcher would probably be just another sad movie by the side of the road waiting for the pirate viewers to grab a ride. James Brundage

Starring: Cillian Murphy, Michelle Yeoh, Chris Evans
Director: Danny Boyle
Scheduled release: April 5


The plot for Sunshine sounds like something out of a Jerry Bruckheimer movie: Fifty years into the future our sun is dying, leaving the Earth locked in a solar winter that will exterminate all life. Mankind's only hope for survival rests with the Icarus II, an eight-man spacecraft sent to fire a stellar bomb into the sun's centre in the hope of re-igniting it. So far, so Armageddon meets Event Horizon.

But Sunshine takes itself more seriously than those bombastic blockbusters, leaning more towards films such as Ridley Scott's Alien and Tarkovsky's Solaris in terms of tone and style, and the results are truly electrifying. British director Danny Boyle (Trainspotting) once again teams up with writer Alex Garland, following on from the success of their virus/zombie hybrid 28 Days Later, and together they have created another tense, claustrophobic and highly exhilarating experience.

Unlike Armageddon, the fate of the planet is not left in the hands of the Americans, but with an international crew of scientists and astronauts, experienced, dedicated and wholly committed to what may very well be a suicide mission. As they near their destination, a stray radio signal is picked up that may very well be the original Icarus craft, a previous mission that ended in failure. The crew are forced to make the tough decision whether or not to investigate, as potentially they may be able to secure the other craft's payload and have two chances at accomplishing their goal. Needless to say that in deviating from their original plan the crew are faced with unpredictable new situations and obstacles, with tragedy and failure ever looming over their shoulders.

What makes Sunshine such a success is how it handles its tech-heavy subject matter with clarity and fluency, a commendation earned in large part by the film's exceptional and diverse cast. Captain Kaneda, played by Japanese actor Sanada Hiroyuki (Ring, Twilight Samurai) is a pillar of stoic leadership, keeping his team focused on their mission when conflicts emerge and never afraid to risk his own life for the greater good. He is ably supported by Cillian Murphy (28 Days Later, Batman Begins), Cliff Curtis and Chris Evans (the only good thing is the woeful Fantastic Four), as well as Malaysian superstar Michelle Yeoh. While there is certainly conflict between crew members, it thankfully never spirals into jingoistic breast-beating, or tussles for leadership. To learn that not everyone survives the mission should come as no surprise, but rarely in a film like this does the audience genuinely grieve the loss of characters as is felt here on more than one occasion.

For what is ostensibly a British production the films special effects are highly impressive, not once allowing the audience to slip out of this meticulously crafted environment. The film's music too, a collaboration between John Murphy and electronic heavyweights Underworld, is a pleasure unto itself, blending tension with otherworldly serenity in a manner that would make Brian Eno proud. The result is a deep space sci-fi thriller that tells a very human story, never falling back on its effects to impress its audience, instead telling a finely crafted story of real people thrust into the most extraordinary of situations. James Marsh