Ralph Fiennes Returns Home
Good morning: In today's edition of The Industry, we look at:
A Cover Story on Ralph Fiennes many journeys to reclaim romance.
In The Industry News: Tom Cruise’s “final” Mission. Gal Gadot + Amazon MGM go for a Runner.
Actor Spotlight: Ben Stiller was a tyrant. Zoe Saldaña’s cartel problems.
Festivals: The Black List project labs and an IDFA doc.
Indie Filmmaker Spotlight/International News: Hiro Murai debuts with A24. Carax on Carax. Neon dates 2073.
Let’s go!
Our live event with two-time Oscar nominee Ross Katz (prod: Lost in Translation) on how to make a beautiful film is tomorrow. Details here:
https://theindustry.co/p/ross-katz-live-event-how-to-make
We love to see Ralph Fiennes make a long return for love.
Fiennes latest film, The Return, is a gritty retelling of Homer’s Odyssey, focused on the final portion of sole survivor Odysseus’ story.
Official Synopsis:
After 20 years Odysseus (Fiennes) finally returns to Ithaca, where he finds his wife Penelope (Juliette Binoche) held prisoner by suitors vying to be king and his son facing death at their hands. To win back his family and all he has lost, Odysseus must rediscover his strength.
Fiennes dauntless passion to reclaim lost love is a cornerstone of his cinema starting with his on-screen debut over 30 years ago.
In Wuthering Heights (1992) Fiennes plays Heathcliff who falls madly in love with Catherine, played by Oscar-winning actress Juliette Binoche, in their first on-screen romance. Much of the film’s action centers on Fiennes’ tormented, obsessive passion as he attempts to win Catherine back after she leaves him for a richer man.
They duo was once again reunited for Best Picture winner The English Patient (1996), a heartbreakingly intimate war story. Fiennes plays a cartographer whose tragic love story unfolds through flashbacks where we see the consequences of his unfulfilled promise to return to his save his love Katharine, who is left stranded in the desert.
While the actual love stories could not be more different in these three films, Fiennes throughout all of them appears both rugged and ruthless while remaining counterintuitively sympathetic, grounded by his pain.
Fiennes described the approach to The Return saying:
“This isn’t a Hollywood sword-and-sandals film, there is an austerity to it. Our Odysseus is a lost soul, a man bruised and scarred, psychologically scarred, by war, who returns home indecisive and unsure of whether he should reclaim his kingdom and take his revenge.”
The film has the makings of a familiar Golden Age epic with a psychological bent, but you can judge it for yourself when The Return premieres in select theaters Dec. 6th.
For More:
The Return Trailer.
Ralph Fiennes’ return in The English Patient. Clip (Warning, major spoilers).
Don’t mess with a Fiennes/Binoche romance. The Wuthering Heights (1992) trailer.
THE INDUSTRY NEWS
The Running Man returns. Cruise is back for Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning, or as it used to be called, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part 2. The title change happened because Paramount appears to be trying to bill this as Cruise’s final Mission Impossible film.
Maybe this isn’t Cruise’s last Mission, but believe it or not, he’s slowly transitioning to do more non-franchise films:
He’s gunning to win an Oscar in the new Iñárritu movie
He’s traveling to outer space in the new Doug Liman film
He’s the sole survivor in a WW2 Mission for Christopher McQuarrie (Dir: MI5 - MI8)
That’s a big move for Cruise whose last non-franchise film was seven years ago with Doug Liman’s American Made (2017). Although of course, Cruise is readying Top Gun 3.
Surprisingly, the MI franchise hasn’t missed a beat and the latest MI7 (2023) film had a wonderfully chilling use of AI as an all-powerful “entity” that had the ability to hack into all systems, at one point simulating the voice of Cruise’s team members and leading to deadly consequences.
The trailer for MI8 is teasing all sorts of throwbacks and easter eggs. The Vault scene in MI1, the rabbits foot from MI3, the CIA director in MI6 (Angela Basset), if you find more let us know.
Releasing on May 23rd 2025, this could be the perfect finale for the Cruise-led series… minus the fact that the production costs have supposedly ballooned to close to $400 M.
In a race against time, Gal Gadot stars in London-set action thriller, The Runner, directed by Kevin Macdonald from Amazon MGM Studios.
While details of the plot and production are scarce for now, here’s what we have:
A high-powered attorney (Gadot) who must race through London, following the cryptic commands of a mysterious Caller, as she fights against time to save her abducted son.
Macdonald is an award-winning director known for his drama doc The Last King of Scotland (2009) and his legal thriller The Mauritanian (2021). This past August, he released a documentary following one of the music industry’s most infamous couples, One to One: John & Yoko.
Veteran producer David Kosse, under his new banner Rockwood Pictures is producing The Runner with no shoot dates announced.
Gadot can be seen next starring as the Evil Queen in Disney’s next live-action Snow White, which is due for domestic release in March 2025.
David Cronenberg and Lynne Ramsay producer Andras Hamori, passed away at 71. Over Hamori’s career, he worked on some legendary films:
Crash (1996)
Role: Co-EP
Film Accolades: Cannes Special Jury Prize
Dir: David Cronenberg
eXistenZ (1999)
Role: Producer
Film Accolades: Berlin Silver Bear
Dir: David Cronenberg
Morvern Callar (2002)
Role: EP
Film Accolades: Cannes Directors' Fortnight Award of Youth
Dir: Lynne Ramsay
More recently, Hamori has produced Samuel Jackson’s The Samaritan (2012) and EP’d Adrien Brody’s History Channel series Houdini (2014).
Hamori’s obit stated:
“He was drawn to unique, visionary stories, often with a literary bent, that could sustain the passion it took to usher them through the years-long development, financing, and production process… He was also something of a ham, who liked to give himself the occasional cameo in his own projects.”
If anyone can spot his cameos in any of the above mentioned projects please send our way.
Hamori will be deeply missed.
Tidbit:
AMC is making a $1.5 bn investment in their theaters. This includes installing more IMAX systems, more Dolby cinemas, and more comfy chairs. AMC’s consumer data shows moviegoers are increasingly seeking out premium large-format experiences.
Errors and omissions: If you haven’t heard by now, Mattel mislabeled their new Wicked dolls. The URL on the back doesn’t go to the film’s website, as intended, but instead to a porn site.
THE ACTOR SPOTLIGHT
Ben Stiller will reprise his role as Hal in Netflix’s Happy Gilmore 2, directed by Kyle Newacheck (Murder Mystery) and starring original cast members Adam Sandler, Christopher McDonald, and Julie Bowen.
Hal was a tyrant in Happy Gilmore, he was the orderly of the nursing home Happy put his mom into, and while he pretend to be nice on the outside as soon as he was alone he became a psychopath, running the nursing home like a sweatshop (clip).
Stiller even did a brief cameo of Hal L in Adam Sandler's other more recent Netflix original Hubie Halloween (2020) he came out of hiatus to do it too, so obviously this character is important to him (clip).
Stiller took a bit of a break from acting to focus on directing which brought us the much acclaimed Severance. But recently it looks like Ben got the bug again, just this year we have previously reported on Stiller attachments to the Christmas comedy Nutcrackers, Dodgeball 2, and the pickleball comedy The Dink.
New Happy Gilmore 2 cast members include Nick Swardson, Benny Safdie, Bad Bunny, Margaret Qualley, and Travis Kelce. Plot details remain scarce, teasing a comeback for Sandler's character.
You can find more about Stiller's return to acting here.
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Zoe Saldaña keeps getting involved with the cartel. Her film The Absence of Eden was just picked up for UK/Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and African rights by Signature Entertainment (Distributer: Terrifier 3, Predestination). The film hit theaters in the US in April and was distributed by Vertical and Roadside Attractions.
In the movie Saldaña, a private dancer in Mexico, kills a cartel member in self-defense and goes on the run to America, where she establishes a better life for herself but is kept under the thumb of an ICE agent.
On the surface this film shares a lot of DNA with Netflix’s Emilia Pérez, which releases on Netflix tomorrow. In the latter, Saldana working for the leader of the Cartel… in a very specific and unique way. The style of Pérez elevates it well beyond anything in the genre, making it a wholly singular work.
Here’s the very opposite trailers:
Read more about Saldaña in Pérez role here:
https://theindustry.co/p/paramounts-problems-lionsgates-bestseller
FESTIVALS
The Black List launches its project labs with six writers. One project and one bio caught our attention.
Bio:
Dylan James Amick grew up in southern Virginia with a stutter, so after a decade of speech therapy, he considers every word carefully. He writes horror that questions what it means to be a monster, and his dream is to create films that make other recovering weird kids feel less alone. Currently, he lives in Los Angeles with his biggest fan (his wife) and his biggest critic (his cat).
This is one of the best written bios I’ve read. So hats off to Dylan!
Project:
FUZZY
Writer: Gabriella Mykal
Logline:
Spurred on by her childhood best friend, a pink fuzzy monster, and her new crush, a closeted high schooler embarks on a psychosexual exploration of love and violence.
Kind of like IT but the hard-core Sundance version.
Find the rest of the Black List Project Labs inductees here.
IDFA doc Light Memories gets picked up by UK distributor Taskovski Films. Here’s the synopsis:
In the family of photographer-turned-filmmaker Misha Vallejo no one ever talks about his grandfather. He only hears about him for the first time as an adult, thanks to an abandoned photo collection. Who was this shadow? And what legacy looms over the family? In his debut film Light Memories, Vallejo shows how the effects of neglect can persist across generations.
The generational trauma is palpable in the trailer. The film premieres at IDFA, which kicks off this Thursday.
INDIE FILMMAKER SPOTLIGHT / INTERNATIONAL NEWS
Hiro Murai (dir: Atlanta), is set to make his feature directorial debut, Bushido with A24.
Written by Henry Dunham, the film is set in feudal Japan, though specific plot details remain under wraps. A24 will produce alongside Square Peg and 2AM, continuing their partnership on several high-profile projects.
Murai and his partnership with Donald Glover has led to some really wonderful cinematic achievements. He directed the floating camera through all of the vignettes in Gambino's This is America Music Video.
In Atlanta he directed 26 episodes and EP’d 41 in total. He directed one of my favorite episodes Alligator man (clip).
He also directed the ultra creepy Emmy Nominated episode Teddy Perkins. Which showcased his versatility to mine the tropes of the horror genre to expose the vampiric nature of fame (clip). Check out Hiro breaking down Teddy Perkins more extensively here.
With Shōgun taking home a historical 18 Emmys last year, samurai films are in the zeitgeist.
Murai’s extensive TV and music video work has earned him multiple Emmy nominations, and Bushido marks his long-awaited entry into feature filmmaking.
Carax on Carax. Leos Carax is a filmmaker whose work bridges the hyper-real to the hyper-absurd. His latest, C’est Pas Moi (It’s Not Me), is a radical montage self-portrait that is a deep examination of the filmmaker's work and his relationship to the history of cinema.
The film, which played at NYFF and a Cannes premiere sidebar, just dropped a new trailer.
The trailer features a seamless cut of his frequent collaborator actor Denis Lavant running in both Carax’s debut Boy Meets Girl (1984) and his follow-up Mauvais Sang (1986, trailer). The latter featured a young Juliette Binoche and Julie Delpy.
My favorite film of the 2010s was Carax’s Holy Motors (starring Lavant as a multitude of characters). The film drove the point home that we are constantly performing our own lives. And there’s something quite horrific and beautiful about the entire enterprise.
In the first of its kind, Sideshow and Janus Films will debut the film theaters in NYC and LA on Dec 10th while it will simultaneously launch on Criterion’s streaming service.
Tidbit:
This is a warning. Neon and Film4’s 2073, directed by Asif Kapadia (dir: Amy), is cut throat with its assessment of our future. Watch this half-documentary, half-fiction on December 27th (trailer).
Come Closer, Israel’s Oscar Entry is picked up by Greenwich Entertainment for US/Canada. The film premiered at Tribeca.
Here’s the synopsis.
When Eden's brother tragically dies, her grief spirals into obsession after discovering his secret girlfriend. A haunting exploration of love, loss and fixation with stunning visuals.
Trailer. No release date has been set.
Channel 4 has commissioned In Flight, a six-part crime drama starring Katherine Kelly (Mr Bates vs the Post Office) as Jo Conran, a single mother thrust into the dangerous world of drug smuggling to save her imprisoned son in Bulgaria. Blackmailed by a criminal gang, she navigates corrupt cops and hired killers across London, Bangkok, Bulgaria, and Istanbul. The series is currently filming.
ON THIS DAY
1960. Stanley Tucci is born.
1962. Demi Moore is born.
See you Wednesday!
Written by Gabriel Miller, Spencer Carter, and Madelyn Menapace.
Editor: Gabriel Miller.
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