Feature Category: Interviews

What lies beyond the black rainbow? To answer that, you need to experience MANDY, the long-awaited new movie from visionary writer/director PANOS COSMATOS. Get ready for love, rage and Nicolas Cage…

Eight years on from his acclaimed debut feature Beyond the Black Rainbow, writer and director Panos Cosmatos returns to the 1980s video rental store of his fervent imagination with a follow-up that is bigger, bolder and equally defiant of categorisation. It’s the story of Red Miller (Nicolas Cage), an introverted lumberjack living the peaceful country life with his girlfriend Mandy (Andrea Riseborough). Their idyll is cut savagely short by the arrival of a cult group led by the lizardly Jeremiah Sand (Linus Roache), a man with friends in multi-dimensional places. From here on in, Mandy is nothing short of an audio-visual assault on the senses – a mind-bending tale of revenge and redemption across landscape of dark fantasy, intense action and full-blown horror. We got the low-down on the film from the Italian-Canadian auteur…

STARBURST: It’s interesting that you’ve chosen a particular era – specifically 1983 – for both of your films, Beyond the Black Rainbow and now Mandy. What were you up to that year we wonder?

Panos Cosmatos: In 1983, I was sitting on the carpet watching Masters of the Universe or just playing in front of the television. For me, 1983 is almost like a blank canvass where anything was possible. It’s sort of a signifier for the mythical realm of all those imaginary films that you haven’t been allowed to see.

How did the concept for Mandy come about?

Well, originally, after my father (prolific action director George Pan Cosmatos) died, I ended up watching all of the Death Wish films in one sitting. And when you watch all or a series of films in a row, it gives you a lot of time and creates a sense of meditation almost where you’re floating through and around what you’re seeing and you reflect on what it is, what makes it work, what’s interesting about it. I started to draw up this idea of making a revenge film that revolved as much around the avenger as it did around the person being avenged, and their essence and presence that had been lost in his life. Not in a religious way, but how their memory would inform the psychic landscape of the avenger and have it be almost like a concept album or a song about that person.

Mandy initially feels like it’s in the same unviverse as Beyond the Black Rainbow, but it develops onto on much bigger emotional canvas…

I started writing it the same time as I was working on Beyond the Black Rainbow and, in retrospect, I realise that I was sort of channelling two different things. Looking back, Black Rainbow was kind of about supressing my grief and my feelings about the loss of my parents and dealing with that. I think I started to write Mandy almost as an antidote to give myself a more cathartic, outward manifestation for these feelings.

Nicolas Cage gives an astonishing performance as Red Miller, your avenger. How did you find working with him?

He’s an extremely methodical, thoughtful actor and he’s hyper-aware of what he’s doing in each scene and how to modulate that. He felt like a friend to me, like someone who really understood where I was coming from creatively. He was able to manifest these ideas I had in my head in an incredible way. It was joyful to work with him.

One of the most striking things about Cage’s performance is how exposed and raw it is – we’re talking Nic Roeg territory. At times you almost want to look away from screen, but you can’t…

Yeah, I wanted to explore the outer realms of what Cage can bring as a performer because he has the ability to go into almost Dada-esque regions while at the same time being the most fragile human being.

Is it true you first had Cage in mind to play Jeremiah Sand, the villain?

Originally, I was leaning towards casting Red quite a bit younger and casting Jeremiah quite old. Not that Nicolas Cage is very old, but I knew he could play quite a bit older or he could play younger and he feels to me like he looks ten years younger in this film. But I was very in love with this idea of him playing Sand opposite and actor in his late-20s or early-30s. Over the course of trying to get this film made, this was the theme that was intriguing to me. So when I went to meet him, I thought we were going to talk about him playing Sand, and he said “I really want play Red Miller”. From my perspective it was like, well, whatever, forget it… it was nice to talk to him. A few weeks later, I had a dream where I was watching Mandy and it starred Nicolas Cage and it was undeniable how amazing it was, or how amazing he was in the part in my dream! So, I woke up and it was like, the gods have spoken and told me that I was wrong. My id had refuted my thesis! [laughs]

Having switched Cage to the hero role, you then cast Linus Roache as the villain, Jeremiah Sand, who is a wannabe shaman, cult-leader, and frustrated pop star. Basically, the kind of guy you meet at a party and try to stay the hell away from – but on a demonic scale of assholedom. Is he someone you’ve previously encountered perhaps?

I’ve met someone like him many, many times [laughs]. Especially on the west coast of North America, the landscape is teeming with Jeremiah Sands. I’ve been exposed to people like him my whole life so it was really a matter of drawing on all that.

Andrea Riseborough is mesmeric as the title character Mandy Bloom, Red Miller’s free-spirited girlfriend and the object of Sand’s desire. How did you pitch the character to her?

She was my first choice to play the part, I just thought she was this amazing chameleon. But again, I felt insecure and thought she wouldn’t want to play the role. From afar, I viewed her as this sort of very Shakespearean actor or something. It turned out that she had seen Black Rainbow and was looking to work with me. I basically told her two stories from my childhood about women I had encountered when I was nine years old. One of them was at a carnival that would come to our town. She was a woman in a booth who would sell Velcro wallets. She had long black hair and wore wire-rim glasses and a Judas Priest T-shirt. In the process of buying this wallet, in a very juvenile way, I just kind of fell in love with her.

The other woman I encountered in my teenage years where my friends and I were cruising some place or other. They wanted to buy weed and we went to a strange apartment complex. We went into this woman’s place and she was freebasing cocaine and drawing these incredible images of unicorns and barbarians and dragons in amazing detail – she’d covered her walls with them. And again, she had long black hair and wire rim glasses and was wearing a heavy metal t-shirt. So when I was writing Mandy, those two people were at the back of mind all the time.

The visuals on Mandy are more fantastical and stylised than your last film. Was this always the intention?

I just wanted to follow my instincts; on Black Rainbow, I was a lot more rigorous about finding reference points for colour palettes and tones and then sticking to them. On this film, we experimented on the fly. I felt more comfortable doing that having had the experience of making Black Rainbow. But it’s is a pace thing, it’s about having your goal and sticking to it whatever the circumstances may be.

On that subject of pace, the second half of Mandy is like a rollercoaster of action and horror sequences. Did you lose much of what you shot in the final edit?

Our schedule and budget on this were extremely tight so there wasn’t really a lot of room for shooting extraneous stuff, but there were two sequences that were quite lengthy that we shot in their entirety that were excised because they just felt like they were slowing the film down. I wish, in retrospect, that I’d just cut those out at the script stage, but it’s kind of hard to know for sure whether something will be integral or not. But given how tight our schedule was, we really could have used that extra day and a half!

The animation sequences in Mandy add an unexpected dimension to the story. What kind of effect on the audience were you aiming for?

I wanted the animation to bring to mind a feeling in the film that was almost joyful in that way animation can be, because it’s a more outward expulsion of these feelings in the story that it can manifest and link together, of these various different talons and forms.

You also rather wonderfully mess with our expectations about how and where a movie’s title should appear!

Yeah, I became kind of obsessed with this idea of pushing the title card as deep into the film as I possibly could!

You may have broken the record. It looks like you went mostly practical for the effects, which is a joy to see in this age of over-egged CGI. One that really stands out involves a body burning alive in a sleeping bag. It’s scarily real – how was it achieved?

Yeah, it’s mostly practical effects, absolutely. That effect essentially was an armature with cables attached to it inside of a sleeping bag that was puppeted.

The late Jóhann Jóhannsson provides a cacophonous musical score that is an essential part of Mandy. How was your collaboration with him?

I really think he was kind of a kindred spirit in a way. I didn’t even think of him to score it because I admired him from afar but thought he was out of my league, or he would have no interest in something like Mandy. But, again, it turned out he was Black Rainbow fan and came to us and asked about my next thing. Then talking to him, I realised he was an Icelandic metal-head as well being this incredibly nuanced, brilliant composer. Over the course of working with him, I really felt like I’d found this connection. I was really looking forward to working with again many times.

What’s next for you, or is it too early to say?

I can’t say for sure yet, it’s sort of brewing in the background and I’m waiting to see which idea will grab a hold of me say it doesn’t want to be ignored!

Mandy is out now on limted edition Blu-ray from Dazzler Media. Read our review of the film here.

In early May, Cinema Paradiso Recordings presented the first-ever vinyl pressing of Michael Small’s score for the 1974 political thriller The Parallax View. Notably, the new reissue features the complete audio introduction to the ‘Parallax Test’, one of the film’s most striking set pieces, To secure that audio, the company needed to secure permission from whomever voiced it, but the mysterious voice was unknown until Cinema Paradiso reached out to writer and producer Jon Boorstin who at the time, worked as director Alan Pakula’s assistant.

It was Boorstin who revealed that the dialogue was spoken by director Pakula himself, a fact little-known for nearly 50 years. Thus, we reached out to speak with Boorstin about his work on the film and this new vinyl release of the score.

STARBURST: Working as the assistant on the film – what did that entail for you, in terms of your involvement in the creation of this film?

Jon Boorstin: I was getting paid a $50 a week as AFI intern and I was watching Gordon Willis shooting, who just shot The Godfather and they wanted him to now shoot The Godfather of political thrillers. As the intern, you sit around and you learn. You’re supposed to watch, but you have no responsibilities, which is a difficult thing to be on a movie set because everyone’s standing around and they have a lot of responsibility and they’re very proud of what they do, so you’re just watching them watch what’s going on and that creates a certain amount of, say, aloofness on their part.

I had trouble breaking in, getting people’s attention, until Gordon Willis decided that I was a good, careful watcher and he befriended me a little bit and then I became part of the camera crew and helped. I could watch with them. We were up in Seattle and the first the thing we did together was we went to see Deep Throat. That was just in the theaters. This is before video, of course. So it was interesting to watch Gordon watch Deep Throat because you see, he was learning something from what he was going to use, if not in our movie and the next movie.

I was completely innocent about that, but I loved documentary films, so I had an experience with filmmaking on a much simpler level. It was a fascinating experience and it opened my eyes to what Hollywood could do, but it was also actually famously chaotic. Gordon ended up saying that it was the most chaotic movie he’d ever worked on because it was shot during the writer’s strike.

That must have been hard…

They were rewriting the movie and they had half a script! That will generally create chaos. The script supervisor, for instance, will give the scenes ‘X’ numbers, which meant she didn’t know where they would go on in the movie, which can confuse everybody, including the editor.

In spite of all that, the movie came together pretty well, and it has a life. Pakula had this gift, he actually thrived on chaos and pulled it together and found it, partly because the movie itself was about disorientation and being lost and the paranoia. We were living through it in our own way. They would sit around – sometimes for hours – during the morning while the thing was being rewritten and then they would shoot it. They couldn’t stop shooting because Warren Beatty was on pay or play, which meant they had to pay him no matter what. He wouldn’t let them delay and rewrite the script. He said, “Well, we’re shooting now,” so they had to shoot it while he was available and were around him, which they did anyway.

The whole chaos behind it does seem like it fuels the mad energy. It is a film that really never stops.

Yes, one thing that Gordon Willis realised that was the only way that movie would work because it wasn’t structured well enough or strong enough to stand up if you stopped and waited and thought about things too long. There’s something that Hitchcock called refrigerator logic, which is: you get up in the middle of the night and you go to the refrigerator for a glass of milk, and you say, “You know, why didn’t she just call the cops?” Hitchcock’s answer was, “Well, if she called the cops, it wouldn’t have been a movie,” so it was a little bit of that going on in this movie too. Nonetheless, it has the momentum and what Alan had the great ability to do was create a kind of zeitgeist. He captured a feeling that was in the air. That was very important and, and oddly enough really, really resonates today. Remember, this is early ’70s. This is a very paranoid time. John F. Kennedy had been killed. his brother had been killed. Martin Luther King had been killed. Freddie Hampton had been killed. Malcolm X had been killed, and there was never really a good explanation of why these people did it. You never felt you really understood the real story.

There’s a scene where Warren Beatty opens a drawer in the dead Sheriff’s house and he sees in it, the application for the Parallax Corporation and that’s going to start the whole plot going, because he tries to join that as a killer. While we were shooting that scene of him, seeing that set, we were watching Richard Nixon with this big stack of blue folders, which are the transcripts of his tapes, saying “I am not a crook” on TV. That was the environment we were working in with Alan. What Alan managed to do was find a way of taking the feelings we had there and making them about something that was fantastical enough and fictional enough that we could give ourselves up to those emotions without being crushed by them.

That was one of the things we were going to ask but you just addressed it very well: the idea of filming a movie about political assassinations coming after a decade where there were so many. We hadn’t even thought about the idea that you’re shooting it in another politically-fraught environment and what that might bring to it.

What we were describing was really wacky, when you think about it, but also very real and Alan was very conscious of that. He didn’t want to make it political in the sense of being left wing or right wing. If you notice, one of the people who’s assassinated in the beginning could have been a John Lindsay, a liberal mayor type guy who’s up on the Seattle tower, but then the guy was shot at the end is a sort of Southern cracker, Texas redneck guy. The implication here is the Parallax Corporation doesn’t have politics. It’ll just kill whoever they want to kill. They’re there to do their job and they do it well, so there’s this brooding thing outside this organising and running our lives in spite of ourselves which is it what it felt like at the time.

They just put out the vinyl of the score and Michael Small had a great option for music, because what you’re trying to do is convey a kind of a certain kind of thing, you know? It’s a complicated emotion because – don’t forget, this was at the end of Vietnam. We were living through the disaster of Vietnam and we were going from being weak before Vietnam. We were telling ourselves that Americans were the heroes from World War II and such, but with Vietnam, we were facing a higher reality and it was a great nostalgia for those good those days when we used to be the good guys and a dread of what we saw was coming. We wanted reassurance we could never get in the real world, so we watched this paranoid fantasy that we knew wasn’t true and felt the emotions that we didn’t allow ourselves to feel in real life to wash over us in the movie and Michael Small evoked those remarkably.

Michael Small’s filmography is so reflective of those sorts of things. He does these movies that have ambiguous endings, like The Parallax View and The Stepford Wives or have this certain sort of moral paranoia to them, like Marathon Man or The China Syndrome. Even Walter Hill’s The Driver is very much that sort of same thing with The Parallax View where it’s about, one man on his own, beset on all sides.

And that sense of unresolved panic that you could evoke. I personally think that he did a beautiful job on all of those, but I think that his masterpiece was the three minute so-called ‘test sequence’ in this movie. The Parallax View has something that a composer almost never gets. There’s a movie within a movie in The Parallax View where Warren Beatty’s trying to convince them he’s an assassin and they give him this test. The test they give him – as we did it, was, he sits down and he puts his hands down and they read his galvanic responses while he’s been watching a series of images, which is scored and has no dialogue. This is Michael Small’s chance to write a three and a half minute paranoid paean to the glories of America and the need to kill people to preserve it. This is what he ended up doing and it’s an amazing piece because it captures both the nostalgia for what a wonderful place America is and all this terrific potential, but also the mind of the assassin, he feels frustrated and angry and deprived and this has been taken away from him and he has to get it back and he has to get the people who kept him from having it. Michael caught that all beautifully. And, of course, the point of the movie is that Warren Beatty really has a mentality of an assassin. I mean, he passes the test. That investigative reporters, which is what Warren Beatty’s playing, have a kind of a similar mentality of ‘take no prisoners’ and ‘get to the bottom of it’ and unreasonableness and assertiveness that these killers have. The movie is really about that odd kinship and it doesn’t demonise the killer. It makes him a kind of a victim.

Michael Small essentially gets to do his own take on that very famous scene from A Clockwork Orange where Malcolm McDowell’s Alex gets his eyes stuck open with all the scenes of violence set to Beethoven, but he gets to do his own music for that.

The thing is, if you look at those two together, there’s a big difference, but at the same time, it was the same sort of gestalt. If you look at Kubrick’s, you’re watching it through Malcolm McDowell’s eyes. In other words, you watch some of the movie and then you cut back. It’s McDowell’s reaction with his eyelids propped open and what’s important isn’t the movie itself. It’s what it’s doing to him, but what Alan decided to do wasn’t that at all. He decided, “I’m going to make the audience Malcolm McDowell.” You are going to sit there and you were going to take this test and you are going to see that you maybe are going to think, “I’m an assassin too,” because you’re going to have the actual emotion of sitting through this whole test, and the driver for that was Michael Small’s score. It creates those emotions in you, just the music does, but of course, the pictures ratchet that up.

It certainly does.

That’s the difference and that’s why this was the key moment in the movie. This is what saved the movie from being a confusing half ass thriller because there’s this bedrock experience there that holds it together. Interestingly enough, when the script was being written, this wasn’t in the script. What was in the script was a scene in which Warren Beatty goes to a bar. He doesn’t know he’s being tested and there’s a bartender there and there’s a little cute little kitten on the end of the bar and everyone’s playing with it. The bartender takes his bottle and he smashes the kitten’s back and throws the kitten away. And then you look: “How’s Warren Beatty going to react to this violence?” Well, nobody liked that. Let’s not kill a kitten and use that as a test. But they didn’t know what to do, so we had this big hole in the movie. So Alan shot this thing with Warren Beatty where he sits in the chair, and he looks at this amazing screen, and that was it. We shot him looking, but not having any reactions, just a blank stare, looking at the screen. In post-production, we made this little three and a half minute movie that we stuck in there. We didn’t cut back and forth to one. There’s no Warren Beatty at all in the whole movie. You would see him sit down, you see the movie, and then he gets up. That’s a very daring thing to do. This is where Alan had the real nerve. He often made movies where he didn’t know how they were going to end and he put himself in that corner and then pulled something out like that.

2021 has been a very good year for The Parallax View. It received a Criterion release in February and now it’s got this soundtrack release a couple of months later. What’s it been like for you, seeing the renewed interest in this film, 47 years on?

I have a strange relationship to it, as you can imagine, because it’s what got me into the movie business. You know that moment when he discovers the Parallax application, and Warren Beatty pulls open the drawer? That’s actually not him pulling open the drawer. That’s me pulling it open. The drawer is another secret. He wasn’t there. We needed a hand model to shoot the closeup. The rest of me doesn’t look like Warren Beatty, but my hands looked like Warren Beatty, so that worked and that’s me. So I have this personal feeling. I still get $10 a year for that from the Actor’s Guild.  The thing is, this is a time that’s eerily similar. We’re at another moment where we don’t know what’s happening. Things seem to be spinning out of control. The whole democratic process seems to be at risk and we don’t know what’s happening or what’s going to happen next. So people seem to be looking at this movie and finding the same kind of reassurance now that we found in it.

The Parallax View soundtrack is out now on limited edition vinyl from Cinema Paradiso Recordings.

STARBURST was lucky enough to talk with AMY MANSON – one of the stars of HBO’s Victorian/steampunk/superhero mash-up THE NEVERS, now available in the UK via Sky Atlantic and/or NOW. We discussed the female-centred series, Princess Diana, and the horror legend that is Pumpkinhead…

STARBURST: How would you describe The Nevers?

Amy Manson: It’s an amalgamation of so many genres – it goes from dark humour to steampunk to fantasy and I think that is going to keep everyone on their toes. It is about a group of ordinary women affected by something extraordinary, set in Victorian London. They are known as ‘the Touched’, which has different factions, and it’s how the Touched interacts with different sections of Victorian London, with the special abilities they have been given.

What attracted you to the series?

Definitely Joss [Whedon] and the script. When I went for the audition I had all these ideas and interpretations of what the scene was and Joss said, ‘no it’s none of those, I just made it up to see what you would do’. We didn’t get the full script until we all signed on but Joss laid out all the ideas that were in his head for each character.

So there was an element of secrecy even in the making?

Very much so.

Would you describe it as a feminist series; does it have feminist elements?

Yes, I think so. I think Joss is great at writing for women. Not only women are ‘Touched’, but you find out why certain people are ‘Touched’. For me, talking from my personal experience – Maladie is on a mission to dismantle the patriarchy. She is just one faction of ‘The Touched’ whereas the rest are just trying to survive and figuring things out as they go.

Your character Maladie is described as being unstable and in charge of a band of renegades, what else can you tell us about her?

You understand her story within the first couple of episodes and how she becomes the head of this faction of the Touched and why they are all fighting for her. As her name suggests, she is a slight lunatic; wayward, anything goes. You figure out there are a few threads that come into play and change her trajectory, to explain why she is doing what she’s doing. Fighting for a good cause, or is she!? [Laughs]

Intriguing! Was it a physical role for you?

Absolutely! We went for a month’s prep prior to shooting with the stunt team, training every day. The challenge was putting the dialogue on top of that. Especially with Maladie’s dialogue, at first, you might think ‘what the hell is she on about?’, but it will become apparent, so dealing with that and then the stunts on top was a challenge.

Was it difficult doing the stunts in full Victorian costume? The Nevers stands apart in this aspect. Victorian fighting women is not something we have seen too much of, if at all?

Definitely. There were great stunt girls, but the stunt team relied on us a lot, which was lovely. I would pair off with Laura [Donnelly, who plays Touched member Amalia True] and we would go through routines. I don’t know how we would have done this in pandemic time. We managed to film the first four episodes prior to the pandemic. Maladie is always going to rub shoulders with anyone who gets in her path.

You are a big advocate of good mental health and have raised funds for the charity Heads Together. Do you think Meghan Markle has helped or hindered the cause by speaking out, especially considering The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge are patrons of Heads Together?

I started working for the charity because my cousin, who is in the air force, his Mother committed suicide 13 years ago and none of us would have known. He was a big advocate of Heads Together. Any discussion on mental health can only be positive. None of us know what she is going through, the weight on her shoulders must be huge. I have just finished filming my section of Spencer, about Princess Diana, and the parallels between my character; Ann Boleyn. Stephen Knight, who wrote the script and writes phenomenally for Peaky Blinders, really delves into her psyche and the emotions of what she was going through at that time, what she was told to wear by the monarchy, it talks about Bulimia but also her psyche, so having just finished that film, you don’t know what is going on behind closed doors. Who do you go to in these times? Diana had nobody to offload to.

We were going to ask you about Spencer, so you play the historical Anne Boleyn?

Yeah, it is based around Diana’s last Christmas at Sandringham before the divorce and there is a book called The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn, which is sitting in Diana’s room, and she is reading this book that has parallels between her and Anne’s experiences. Anne then comes back as a vision or apparition and is kind of goading Diana [played by Kristen Stewart] – challenging her, making her think in different ways. It’s shot beautifully by Seamus McGarvey, who was the DOP on two episodes of The Nevers. Two beautiful things I have been involved in!

Is Spencer coming out this year?

November, I don’t think anybody knows that, so there you go.

Exclusive! Here at STARBURST we love our horror films and we wanted to ask you about your first film role, which was Pumpkinhead 4: Blood Feud. What was the experience like?

Yeah, when I arrived there I met Lance Henriksen and he was quite standoffish at first. I was the newbie fresh out of drama school. I read lines to him off camera and it was a really emotional scene, then I started crying, he started crying and gave me a massive hug afterwards, so it was like a rite of passage. A few of us went for dinner that night, I didn’t realise what a big deal he was and how great he was. That was the start of my Pumpkinhead journey. I threw myself in, you have to ask yourself ‘what is your truth?’ I loved it, and relished every moment on set.

Brilliant. Would you like to do any more horror in the future?

Definitely! I did a film called Estranged, maybe more of a psychological thriller, and the director Adam Levine has sent me a script to read, it’s a bit like The Descent. So I will read it and let you know!

All episodes of THE NEVERS are now available in the UK courtesy of Sky Atlantic and NOW