Feature Category: Article

Legendary writer, director, producer, and artist FRANK MILLER talks CURSED, the latest of his celebrated works to be adapted for the screen…

STARBURST: With Netflix’s Cursed, you and co-creator Tom Wheeler are playing with perspective. It’s a retelling of Arthurian legend told from the Lady of the Lake’s point of view. What do you think exploring a story from a different angle does for both the original story and for the one spinning off of it? How does it enrich both? 

Frank Miller: To use your word, it ‘explores’. This is material that’s open to endless exploration. It’s been examined and imagined by many talents over a very long period of time, as well as by amazing illustrators. And so, there are wondrous places to go. Tom and I are just going down all the different little paths and seeing what we feel like pulling out and examining and illuminating. 

What is it about this character, about Nimue, that resonates the most with you? What was the selling point here? 

I’ve always loved the legend and everything about it. This is just stuff that had to happen. But Nimue in particular… Tom’s inspiration was his daughter. She helped him bring a perspective to the legend and to tie everything together. He used her as a way to bring the magic into all of this. She is the magic of the story. Her hero’s journey gives us a fresh take that has never been examined before. It makes this less of a boy’s story. 

There’s the concept of the hero’s journey, or the monomyth, and how humanity is essentially telling one story, describing one experience, in different voices. How does Cursed both honour that common human resonance and bring a fresh voice to the business of being alive? 

That is something that I believe is largely discovered scene by scene. A hero is not defined so much by standing in front of a lightning bolt as it is by individual decisions made, particularly in times of stress. And with a young lead character in an alien hostile world, we see someone who has to face questions of intelligence, survival, and morality all the time. And there’s romance, where is as natural of a stage in our lives as any.

How do think viewers will connect with Nimue? You touched on it when you said she grows up, finds romance… 

There’s this theme of nature being so powerful. But I think what’s really gonna sell Nimue is Katherine [Langford]. They’re gonna see all the stuff that Tom and I talk about coming through her eyes, in her voice, and you’re gonna fall in love with her. 

In both the show and the book, there’s this mix of medieval superstition, blind fanaticism on the part of the antagonists, the Red Paladins, and this family loyalty to her mother that really enriches the story. But underneath all of it is this really cool exploration of fear and how her fear and the fear others show her impacts her evolution. Can you speak a little on that? 

There’s a lot I love about that because it’s so much to do with her fear of what’s around her, obviously, but there’s also other people’s fear of her exceptionalism. That’s something I enjoy. She is not like the rest. And she’s going to learn that and know that better and her coming to know that to that extent and use it is really an integral part of the storyline. But also this is a world of fear. This is a world where demons dwell. Where ancient religions are in conflict with contemporary religions which are in conflict with internal truth. 

Season 1 of CURSED launches on Netflix July 17th. 

For more of our chat with Frank Miller, pick up issue 473, out July 30th.

Life in lockdown hasn’t just been a strange new present, it’s also shone fascinating perspectives on the past. Black Rainbow, from acclaimed British director and screenwriter Mike Hodges (Get Carter, The Terminal Man, Flash Gordon) was barely seen on original release in 1989 due to distribution problems, but has just had a timely return on Blu-ray. Rosanna Arquette stars as Martha Travis, a medium in a touring clairvoyant show run by her alcoholic pappy (Jason Robards). But what seems a typical con act cleaning up in the God-fearing American South takes an intriguing turn into the supernatural when Martha foretells the death of a local factory worker-turned-whistle-blower…

We caught up with Hodges, now 88 and living in the splendid isolation of Dorset, to uncover the secrets of Black Rainbow before delving further back into his famous career to find out just what makes the man who made Michael Caine drink from a tall glass go tick…

STARBURST: What was the inspiration for Black Rainbow?

Mike Hodges: The strands of it were numerous. I wrote it on spec, I wasn’t commissioned to write it and its odd that it was 30 years ago and it’s been rejuvenated in the middle of a pandemic. I really became conscious of how damaging globalisation had become to the environment and I wanted to find some way of making a film that would be a thriller but touch upon this subject which really concerned me. There was a medium called Doris Stokes who was operating in this country and I saw her on TV and suddenly thought ‘that’s really interesting’ and I could have story with a medium who could foretell the future by describing what she was seeing there…

Was the small-town US setting shaped by first-hand experience?

Whenever I’d previously been working in America in my earlier career, I was going around looking for locations and went to quite a lot of small towns where the local newspapers were quite often reporting on factory workers being beaten up or even murdered – they were usually foreman or union officials. Upon investigation it would turn out that they had been whistle-blowers on health and safety, so I built that in to the script. And then back in the ‘60s when I was on World in Action [Hodges cut his teeth as a documentary filmmaker on the flagship ITV series] I’d gone to Detroit to interview the Reuther brothers, Walter and Victor, who were the mainstays of the United Automobile Workers Association. Both of them had been assaulted when they were trying to set up the union by G-men employed by the manufacturers. They’d both been shot at through their windows. Victor lost and eye and Walter lost an arm. So quite of lot of these elements started percolating into my head.

Do you believe in mediums or the paranormal?

I don’t really believe in mediums, frankly, but I watched Doris Stokes working the crowd and realised that she was gathering information to convince them that she was communicating with their loved ones. The one I’m dealing with in Black Rainbow, we never quite know if she’s for real or not but suddenly time is warped. In the beginning, you see her look at her watch and she’s a hour out. These are clumsy ways of saying that something is happening. I started playing around with time right the way through, actually, to the very end when the car is covered in this Kudzu weed, which is another thing I’d noticed when I was in the southern States, this weed climbing all over houses that had gone into decay like in Gone With the Wind. I used Kudzu as a kind of metaphor for nature fighting back because it will be there always, and long after we’re all gone and we finally self-destruct!

Black Rainbow is your least-known film. What happened to it back in 1989?

I’m grateful to Arrow for salvaging it because the film had just been totally lost. Whatever one thinks about the film, it should have been seen here. It was very successful in Europe and Japan, but here in the UK, because of distribution troubles with Palace Pictures and Miramax in America both being in financial trouble, they wanted to cash in as quickly as they could. Palace dumped it onto VHS within 4 or 5 weeks of it opening and Miramax stuck it on some obscure cable channel. By the time I got to look at it again, we were in this pandemic. Much of what the film is about is even more relevant because the pandemic has ripped the lid off society and opened a terrible can of worms, which was always there. It’s pretty grisly what we’re seeing in terms of the poverty and the deprivation people are going to have to suffer. It’s always the poor that get it.

You’ve previously described the engine that drives your work as “manipulation, exploitation and human gullibility”. Even for films as very different in tone as Get Carter and Flash Gordon, that’s the connecting thread…

I’m horrified by the things that we do to each other. It’s mind-boggling how cruel we can be to each other and I find that aspect of the human species very painful. I was brought up as a Catholic, but I soon abandoned it in my early teens. But who should teach at my school but William Golding, the novelist who wrote Lord of the Flies. So I was alerted at a very early age!

Get Carter was made in just six months, from the idea to the movie’s release. How did you pull it off?

I got Ted Lewis’ book [Jack’s Return Home, 1970] and the deal was done with me. Needless to say I only got £7,000 for writing and directing it plus residuals! Painful, but there you go, I was still grateful. I wrote the script, found the locations, cast the film, found the crew. We shot a scene in London in the flat at the beginning of the film and were filming on the train up to Newcastle. Six or seven weeks later, we’d finished shooting! It was made in such a white heat that you didn’t have time to stop to think about anything, frankly, and that does affect the experience of watching it. I thought it was going to be like that all the time but was I wrong! I did get to make another nine films but it took me 40 years…

Why does Get Carter still resonate so strongly?

It’s a very intense film, it’s like a Jacobean Tragedy, really. Caine is amazing as the star; I had a terrible fight to get all the cast around him to be British actors who had not made films, apart from Ian Hendry [then in the throes of alcoholism but brilliant as Carter’s slimy associate Eric Paice]. It was MGM money and they wanted all sorts of ridiculous people like Telly Savalas and there was an actress from Peyton Place who they wanted too. I literally resigned every time they suggested someone – I said forget it, I’m not making this. So I eventually got my way; the card I played was to include Britt Ekland who only has a small role anyway and is very good in it. But I knew with Caine in the lead role I wouldn’t need any other stars, it rooted Jack Carter having all these unknown faces. I mean Richard Attenborough, not to be rude about him, but he used to fill his films with star names so you spend the whole bloody movie going “oh look there’s whatsisname and there’s old so-and-so – hello there!” I just wanted Jack Carter away from all that.

After Get Carter you made another movie with Michael Caine called Pulp, which was a very different kettle of fish…

Pulp was a totally different film but in fact is a scream against fascism. When I made it in 1972, I couldn’t believe that the Fascist Party was winning in local elections and doing very well. I just couldn’t get my head around the idea that, after the war, the fascists were still in existence after the horrors that had been revealed. It was a comedy that got darker and darker as it went on. Eventually you realise the main character [Caine as paperback hack Mickey King] is trapped, although he’s a crap writer, in one of his own awful books. I’m not sure if I ever got quite the balance in the film between the serious elements and the comedic, but there we go.

Flash Gordon, which is celebrating its 40th Anniversary this year, was also a bit of a scramble to get made, was it not?

With that film, I didn’t have any control at all, the opposite of Get Carter really. I just improvised because there was no other way I could get through the film. But the same affect, it’s like a souffle, Flash Gordon – had to throw all the right ingredients in and luckily it rose!

Flash Gordon was produced by the legendary Italian empresario Dino De Laurentiis How did you two get along?

The joy of working with both [Get Carter producer] Michael Klinger and Dino was the fact that they just gave you an answer when you wanted something. The film industry quickly developed into being run by committees and producers who weren’t strong in that way. The people are quite rare who make a decision there and then and that was a delight with Dino because it wasn’t always like that. In the mid-‘80s I had terrible times with weak producers.

In 1974 you made The Terminal Man, based on the novel by Michael Crichton. It starred George Segal as a scientist who has computer circuitry implanted in his brain to stop his blackouts. Looking at modern medical science, it’s another concept whose time seems to have come.

It has and I’m hoping Arrow can get their hands on it. When I finished the film Warner Bros said the audience didn’t feel there was anyone to like in it, which is fine, they wanted someone in it to like. So I gave them a new scene, a pre-title sequence using photographs and I took a scene from later on and added that before the titles. I’ve always regretted doing it because it didn’t make a scrap of difference. If you didn’t sympathise with the main character, then you’re not human as far as I’m concerned. Warners inherited Get Carter from MGM and just a year after I made it they did Hit Man [1972] which was a black version [also adapted from Ted Lewis’ 1970 novel, it starred Blaxploitation mainstays Bernie Casey and Pam Grier]. And then they allowed another remake with Sylvester Stallone [in 2000]. They had the rights to do it, so they didn’t consult me or talk to me, but they used the same title and that really made me angry because people really do sometimes think I’m responsible for that piece of shit.

What are you up to these days?

I’m writing a lot [Hodges is also a novelist], including three novellas that are out Amazon – Bait, Grist, and Security. Then I’ve written about six or seven short stories which I hope will get published. Needless to say the literary world is just as bizarre as the film world. I don’t quite fit in there either. They’re satires and I think they’re very funny. But then again, I’ve got this bleak sense of humour…

Black Rainbow is out now Blu-ray from Arrow Video.

Despite hailing from Jersey City, New Jersey, and only being 35 years old, composer Joseph Trapanese has rapidly ascended to join the ranks of today’s most exciting composers. Due in no small part to the composer’s work with such musical luminaries as French electronic acts M83 and Daft Punk) the latter of which he helped compose the massively successful score for Tron: Legacy), along with his work composing scores for films as diverse as the live-action Disney remake of Lady and the Tramp or musical The Greatest Showman, Trapanese seemingly defies categorisation. It’s a fascinatingly broad selection of work in a very short time, and so we were very excited to get the chance to speak with him about his career up to now…

STARBURST: How does a musician and composer who does film scores, who grew up in New Jersey, hook up with two of the biggest electronic-inspired bands out of France?

Joseph Trapanese: Yeah, the kid from Jersey City, right? I’ve no right doing any of this but, you know – I think the funny thing is, I remember going to school and learning about music, attending music conservatory, and just really putting in all this time to try to become a musician. One of the tough things about music conservatories, for me, was that there is always this talk about style. That’s important: you have a style now, but you know, I’m 18. I don’t know what style is. I have no idea; I’m still developing a taste.

I don’t come from a musical family, so it was so exciting you to learn about music. I think that led to me just being so naturally curious about music and what I found is that style is really a development of what your loves and passions are. So, for me, my love and passion were the orchestra. I grew up watching films and listening to film music, falling in love with classic film scores, which obviously use a lot of orchestra, so I naturally wanted to learn about the orchestra.

But at the same time, when I was younger, it was kind of the advent of the home studio. All of a sudden, you could make music on your own and so, I wanted to get my hands on with music. What music could you make on your own? It’s electronic music. You could have a computer make a beat or work with the synthesizer and make electronic music. I was very into producing electronic music just by myself and my bedroom and so, when I went to the music conservatory in New York – which is very classical and classically oriented, learning about Bach and Beethoven and doing that sort of thing – I was always the black sheep.

I’d go down into the basement and play with synthesisers all night, so I think ultimately what led me to hook up with these artists was that I had a certain skillset that helped translate what they were doing to the orchestra. I had such tremendous love and respect for what they did in the studio with electronics, which naturally made me a good collaborator, because there are a lot of people who come from an orchestral background who don’t actually respect that sort of music.

Me being curious and excited is a testament to me as a person. I’m just naturally curious and eager to collaborate and that really led to these these interesting opportunities where I get put in the studio with these amazing musicians.

A kid from New Jersey? How did this happen? I just happened to have this skill set that actually works really well for exactly that type of collaboration.

These are both artists who – even prior to you working with them  – did release albums which already had a cinematic lean to them, especially in the case of M83’s Saturdays=Youth, which is very much a concept album built around the idea of John Hughes’ ’80s teen movies and pop with a really glossy sheen to it. However, in addition to working with M83 and Daft Punk, you’ve done so much work in in the action realm. Was that also because it seems like electronic music has been slowly but surely like finding its way into action orchestral scores over the last decade?

Really strongly, and that’s a great point, because one thing to remember about films – that I always tell students if I’m speaking at USC or somewhere – is that directors want their films to be unique. No director ever makes a movie saying, “Oh, this movie’s just like that other movie.” Filmmakers worth working with have these visions and these ideas and a style and aesthetic and a goal.

An important thing is if the composer’s going to be able to bring an equally unique vision to the table. We started off this interview talking about style, and another thing it took me a long time to learn, that I really enjoy doing now is when a director approaches me to talk about a film – whether the film is shot or is going to be shot in two years, it doesn’t matter – is finding their vision for the film and then figuring out how I help delineate that stylistically on my end.

A movie that comes to mind is Only the Brave. Joseph Kosinski was a visionary director I loved working with, but one of the big things he brought to the table to talk about sonically was, first of all, how important guitars are, because these guys had guitars and will play guitars and the music they love was guitar-driven. I’m not a guitarist so, all of a sudden, I had to learn all about the guitar and work with guitar players and figure out how to form textures.

Another thing is the firehouse that these firemen were in – that was a movie about firemen – was just put together with corrugated metal. The outside is these sheets of corrugated metal so the idea was, “What does that sound like musically?” We were talking about Dobros and these metal guitars. It’s interesting: not every idea you have or not every inspiration you have is going to lead you down the right path to something successful, but it’s important, nonetheless, because you’re starting from a place of creativity, rather than building on the shoulders of some other idea.

To get back to your question about why new action scores have these sounds now is exactly that: even when Michael Bay’s making the 18th Transformers, I’d think, “What is the new thing happening here that we can build upon?” I think it’s especially important when you look at sequels. Say, “Hey, we have something already successful going, but if we just did that again, how boring would that be? How do we approach this with a renewed sense of artistry?”

Pic: Dan Goldwasser

Building on the shoulders of other ideas also seems to be something that your talents lend themselves to. When I think about movies as seemingly disparate as Straight Outta Compton, which is a biopic, and then, The Greatest Showman, which – while also technically a biopic – is an out-and-out musical, the music is the message in both of those films. These are movies where there’s already a wall of music and I’m curious as to how you work within those constraints to compliment and contrast?

That kind of goes back to the original question we were talking about: collaboration. That’s something that I feel strongly about: that I bring something where I’m looking at the whole picture. I’m not just thinking, “Oh, this is where my score begins or my score ends.” It’s like, “No – it’s important to think about the entire soundtrack of it as a whole,” and I even mean sound effects. Steven Spielberg famously said that sound is 50% of a movie and he’s right. Most good movies, you could close your eyes, listen to them, and know exactly what’s going on – even without dialogue – and so, it’s really important for me, personally.

The way I work and my aesthetic is for me to be fully aware of the entire sonic picture. That means soundtrack. That means songs. Regardless of whether is there’s one song or there 50 songs, I’d like to be aware. With Straight Outta Compton, the true star of that movie is the music, so it becomes even more important for me to understand my role in a film like that. To talk about Straight Outta Compton for a second: I had some friends say to me when news broke, “Oh, great – you’re going to write a hip-hop score.” I said, “No, I’m not writing anything to do with hip-hop next to the king of hip-hop, Dr. Dre.” Or maybe the Emperor? They’re beyond king, like the important people in hip-hop ever. I’m not going to do anything to compete with that. What I’m going to do is, I’m going to compliment that. I’m going to write music that fills in the blanks. For me, hip-hop is all about bravado, and energy, excitement, and confidence. What we were able to achieve in that biopic is that we looked at the humanity of these artists as people. That’s where the score came in. The score was able to underline the moments of humanity and weakness that we all have. I was able to score the parts of the movie that just couldn’t be going to be scored with hip-hop, so to speak.

The Greatest Showman – that was so much fun for me because, I think my involvement with that film was really full circle, because I started on that film very early, before it was greenlit and helped come up with some of the earliest demos of the songs. I helped Pasek and Paul develop the language of that music, so we kind of launched the film together with those early demos. Then I came back in later in the process to help beautify the score and the songs together and do final production, kind of unifying the tone of the film, so that was really exciting for me, too.

It was a great and really rewarding experience, because I got to work with those incredible songwriters. I got to work with John Debney, one of my musical heroes, and a legend in film scoring. Michael Gracey, I think he’s incredible. I have to pinch myself that, because of the little skill set I have, at times, found myself in these really unique situations which you’d be pressed to find an ‘average film composer’. That’s not necessarily the skill set you’re told to have when you went to become a film composer. Like Liam Neeson says, “I have a very particular set of skills.”

Pic: Dan Goldwasser

The live-action Lady and the Tramp is based on a film that already has a very notable score by Oliver Wallace, with Bella Notte being one of the Disney classics. The Raid: Redemption had a score for the original release in Indonesia. What is it like to have to go through and completely re-score a movie?

I’ll answer them separately, as they’re very both obviously very different scenarios. With Lady and the Tramp, you’re right: legendary music. I mean, how do you wanna ‘rescore’ a cinematic achievement like the original Lady and the Tramp? It kind of ties into something else we spoke about earlier, which is this creative intent. What is the creative intention behind remaking Lady and the Tramp? That’s something that Charlie Bean, the director – whom I’ve known for a very long time – that’s something we spoke about right away, because we didn’t want to fall into the trap of, “We’re remaking a movie because we can.” No. All credit’s due to Charlie. Charlie wanted to establish this for everything about the film: why we are making this film now and the reason for redoing this film now, musically, was because we wanted to dig deeper into the original intention of why the story was being told.

So, for instance the 1955 version of Lady and the Tramp takes place at the same time as our newer version. Our new the story takes place in the teens – around 1910-1915. Somewhere like that. If you watch the original film and you listen to the score and you listen to the songs, the actual quality of the music is very 1950s  – and I think this is great and fantastic ’50s music – but we said, “No, if we’re going to retell this story again, let’s dive deep into the music of the actual time period.”

What that led to was looking into the music of New Orleans; black American music and early jazz. All of a sudden, something that could have been this warmed-over, microwaved Lady and the Tramp music became something that had true intent and true direction, and the same thing in the score. For instance, we’re talking about both score and songs, and both score and songs had that intent of looking at that popular music of the 1910s. Then, even for the score, we said, “Okay, so for Lady’s character, she’s this upper middle class character. She’s trained. She has a family, but she has all these things that hint at being upper middle class. Where does that music come from?” and we said, “Oh, well, classical music is very formal – very, very trained. What was the classical music like at the time?”

We went back, digging deep into classical American music – Americana, that sort of thing – and then, what’s exciting is the way these two things met in the score. What wound up happening is Tramp’s character was driven by that early American jazz, and the music of New Orleans. He improvises. He’s fast on his feet – very joyous, but he’s untrained, whereas Lady comes from a more refined school of thought – but when these two characters meet and their lives start to intertwine, it’s the same, too, for their music. All of a sudden, as they meet on this dinner date, this music starts to starts to weave together.

The really exciting thing about our new score is that the music is an integral part of the storytelling process and I think that, if you were to point out one thing which gets me excited about going to the studio each day, it’s exactly that: music can have true intention behind and it can be a part of the storytelling process if you set that up right. It could really enhance the movie and so, I feel really strongly that we were able to do that on Lady and the Tramp.

If I was to talk about The Raid, that’s a whole different genre. The funny thing about The Raid was when Mike Shinoda and I came in, it’s kind of a way to spruce up the movie for American audiences. The film was done, but Sony said, “Hey, we want to do something cool. We’re bringing this to the US. Let’s do a cool score idea.” It’s never a great day when you replace another composers work, because it really is a brotherhood and sisterhood and a family – the family of musicians and artists – and you want to respect each other, so it was really important for me to just say, “I’m not going to listen to the old score. I’m just going to do this from scratch on our own and just see what happens,” and it was one of the most rewarding things to happen.

First of all, I have a great friendship and relationship with Mike Shinoda now. He’s an incredible artist and we’ve worked together since and it’s been such a pleasure to do that, I actually have a great relationship with the original composers that we replaced because, at one point in Sundance, Gareth Evans – our filmmaker – was asked, “Hey, your film was scored twice. Which was your favorite?” and he said, “I love them both. I think that my perfect score would be bits and pieces of both, put together.”

Well, guess what? We get to The Raid 2 and Mike, unfortunately, is too busy working on an album and Gareth says, “Hey, Joe – would you work with my original Indonesian composers on the sequel?” I said, “That sounds fun. That sounds great.” They flew to LA, they got an Airbnb about ten minutes from my house and, every day for a month, we worked together in the score. Gareth would come over in the evening – he was editing at another Airbnb down the street – and we would have dinner. The three of us have been working together all day on the score and it was some of the most fun I’ve ever had.

A lot of times people ask me, “Joe, why do you do all these collaborations? You’re a film composer – just establish your own solo voice?” What I say to them is, “I have done that. You could listen to my solo scores.” For me, to turn down opportunity to work with these cool people and collaborate? That’s ridiculous. I love collaborating with others. Both those stories are really great stories of collaboration – of this effort of working together to make music a real part of the storytelling.

Lady and the Tramp is available to stream on Disney+

Main image by Tim Navis