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Drew Pearce | HOTEL ARTEMIS

Written By:

Michael Coldwell
pearce

You might call Drew Pearce is ‘blockbuster specialist’. He co-wrote Iron Man 3, wrote the story for Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation and has ‘script-doctored’ many other big budget movies he’s too polite to mention. This year sees the release of his first feature in the director’s chair, the low-budget SF noir Hotel Artemis starring Jodie Foster, Jeff Goldblum and Dave Bautista. He talked to us about budget constraints, the MCU family, and trusting his snake brain…

STARBURST: Hotel Artemis was your first time out directing a feature, how was it like making the transition from writing?

Drew Pearce: The tricky thing with an indie movie is, not only is your brain worried about actually making the film, you need a whole other brain because every other day your movie could fall apart and feels maybe like it will. I mean, eight days before we started shooting, we still didn’t have some of the financing and we looked like we weren’t going to make it to set, you know? So, it’s a true emotional rollercoaster of an experience but also pretty brilliant. It ended up being so compacted because the people that bought it in America then wanted to rush-release it, so between me actually finishing the movie and it coming out there, was only eight weeks. And then there’s been this gap between the American release and the places I care about just as much like Britain and France, the places I grew up. It’s interesting because after a movie comes out you expect a feeling of closure, but I haven’t had the chance to have that yet. And by the way, I love that – the UK is embracing Hotel Artemis more than anywhere else which I’m so proud of.

It’s a low-budget movie with a high-end cast, how did you manage to assemble your actors?

Jodie Foster hunted out the script in a way that she still will not tell me, before we’d even sent it out to anyone else. So, she came to me about the role, and she was very generous, and we sat down for four hours and she said, “look, I know you have to talk to other people, but just know I love it and I want to be The Nurse”. I walked out of the meeting and maybe gave it 20 seconds before I speed-dialed my producer as was like, “Just book Jodie Foster right now!”. And that’s part of how the cast came together; on the one hand, it’s hopefully because the writing of the characters was bold and there was stuff that each actor felt like they could get their teeth into. But I think also having Jodie Foster on it is a seal of approval, especially for a first-time director that actors might be wary of taking the leap to working with. But if two-time Academy Award winner and veteran of 45 years of the highest level of movie acting Jodie Foster is willing to make that leap, then maybe they can to. I purposely cast people to be slightly skewed from what they normally do, you know? I think that can make a role a lot more appealing to an actor. I didn’t do it in order to get people, I did it because I wanted to explore different facets of the actors involved, but I think that helped put this cast together.

You had the great Jeff Goldblum on set for a few days. What was your approach to directing such a force of nature?

Yeah, but a little Jeff can go a long way! He’s a dream. I was texting with him yesterday about the statue that’s just gone up by the Thames (The monument celebrates 25 years of Jurassic Park and has Goldblum reclining, open-shirted, in a recreation of his famous ‘sex god’ pose from the 1993 blockbuster). He ended the text exchange with the emoji for a wolf, and then a crown, and then the words “for eternity”. That sums up how much of a legendary man he is. He is everything you would hope he would be. He is as ‘Jeff Goldblum’ off-screen as he is on screen. He and I share a lot in common, we share a similar taste in movies and also in the design and style of things, though I wish I was as stylish as Jeff Goldblum…Jesus, is anyone? But he honestly was a dream; when he walks on set it’s like Sinatra is there.

The movie takes place almost entirely with the hotel itself. What were the challenges to working on that set?

Oh God, literally everything. I mean, first of all we couldn’t afford to build the whole of the floor it takes place on. We could only afford two bedrooms and one corridor, so you’re-dressing everything as you go. I knew right from the beginning that with this being a bubble movie, a chamber piece, that I would be hopping between bedrooms, and that’s one of the reasons that I came to the idea of the themes of each room being a different vacation destination from the 1920s. I knew that would allow me to put up a beautiful huge mural and change the colours of the room. What I didn’t know was that, because of the budget, we would have to re-dress the two rooms we had and be bouncing just between them. So after three days of shooting in the Honolulu Suite, I would never be able to go back there, because that room would never exist ever again. Doing anything on a budget is a huge challenge but creating a world that’s a view through a keyhole to a bigger universe? That’s giant, but it’s also glorious – the cliché about limitations fuelling creativity is also totally true. One of the great things about the fact we shot it in LA is all the set dressing and stuff that brings that really amazing production design to life is from the back of warehouses where things have been sitting there gathering dust since 1920. So instead of building all that stuff, creating every statue and every detail like you would on a big movie, we got to fill our set of the Artemis Hotel with the reality of 1920s Los Angeles – literally. That’s a gift and you have to run towards the gifts when you’re making low budget movies.

You wrote Iron Man 3 which kick-started Phase 2 of the MCU with an altogether more nuanced take on the characters of Tony Stark that set the tone for a lot of the wider character development we’ve seen in the films that followed. Would you like another shot at the MCU?

I was part of the MCU family very closely for a good few years and I’m still friends with everyone there. It’s still a tiny, tight-knit community. That’s what’s incredible about Marvel, you can talk about it as a machine, but as much as it has dates to hit and movie to do, Kevin (Feige) never makes a thing he doesn’t believe in, and he will stop developing it if that happens. They are kind of made like the biggest mini-movies in the world. On Iron Man 3 there were five of us. We were on it from the first day to the final day, which was two-and-a-half years, and really there were no decisions that came from outside of that group of Kevin, Robert (Downey Jr.), Shane (Black, Director), me and Stephen Broussard, who is the Exec under Kevin. And don’t get me wrong, you suddenly realise when you come to work on other blockbusters what a luxury that is. Again, people talk about the fact that Kevin has a strong control over the universe, but I think what comes with that is that a) he’s fucking brilliant at making Marvel movies, and b) you don’t have to sell anything up the line at Marvel. You’re sitting directly opposite the people who will say yes or no. That is one of the reasons why the Marvel blockbusters are often much more idiosyncratic – if you pitch something to Kevin and he likes it, it’ll go in the movie, or we’ll certainly shoot and then look at it in the edit. So, of course, Thor: Ragnarok isn’t pure Taika Waititi, in the way that Hunt for the Wilderpeople is, but I think there is a hell of lot more auteur in Ragnarok than there is in a lot of other summer blockbusters. The conversation is continually open. When I go back there I want it to be something that I love as much as I loved Iron Man 3. I want it to be something I believe in that much because it is two and a half years of your life. I don’t take jobs for the sake of it; I truly believe that whether you’re making your little indie movie or a $250 million blockbuster, your intention, at least in the beginning, should be to shoot for something great and full of personality. Now obviously, the course of making things can corrupt that fine endeavour, but hopefully when, not if, I work again with the gang at Marvel it can be for something that I can be proud of.

Perhaps a new cycle of Iron Man films? We keep getting heavy hints that Tony Stark’s story is coming to end but, after all, he’s the MCU’s most popular character and business is business…

Who knows! It’s really funny, I knew some stuff about Infinity War, but I don’t know much about what comes at the end and I literally don’t want to, I just don’t want to. I really want to see how this goes. It’s exciting!

The Mandarin twist (that he’s just a bloke called Trevor playing a part) in Iron Man 3 was really unexpected and largely well-received. But did you think “hang on, I could be asking for it here…”

I think every single day for the next two years after Shane and I came up with it we expected the boot to drop and it to be taken away from us, that in the re-shoots we would just have it that Sir Ben Kingsley was a straight-up bad guy or whatever. And that never happened, the boot never dropped, Kevin was always a cheerleader for it. And by the way, that support from Kevin was in the face of what at the time was the Marvel Creative Committee – there was a certain accountability that Kevin had to them that he doesn’t have now. Marvel Studios is now his domain and is all the more settled for it. But here’s the interesting thing: we did get a bit of shit (for the Mandarin twist) but neither Shane nor I care one jot. In the nicest possible, most respectful way, I do not think I ruined the dreams of your childhood by adapting the Mandarin into a different character. In fact, and this is something that I really like to make clear, I think what I did with the Mandarin is entirely thematically in line with what the creation of the Mandarin was. In the 60s, the Mandarin was a “yellow peril” demonization of a perceived threat that was coming from Asia, and it was propagandist in creation and intent. I think it’s very hard to argue that that isn’t the case, it’s one of the clearest examples of pop culture orientalism, certainly in comics. What we did with the Mandarin is we took that idea of a piece of propaganda and we simply acknowledge that that’s what it was in the character itself. In a way, for me, it’s actually the only right way in our era that you can honour that character. Of course, other people could have done it different ways, but for Shane and I, it wasn’t only the best way to unlock the Mandarin, it was actually the most exciting and relevant villain that we found in the pantheon. He’s certainly in the upper tier of the Iron Man rogue’s gallery. Plus, it’s a ballsy move! When was the last time that a blockbuster a) had a giant surprise that nobody found out about and b) essentially took an idea from an Adam Curtis documentary (The Power of Nightmares) and ‘Trojan Horsed’ it into the centre of a blockbuster that made $1.3 billion? I will never not be proud of that – plus it’s really funny!

When you’re watching other franchises, do you find it easy to let go and just enjoy these blockbusters or is there a writer’s voice in there that’s critiquing the script?

That’s a really interesting question. Even though my secret job is often coming in and script doctoring or edit doctoring some of the bigger movies to help out directors or writers that I love, I do also have this weird ability to completely turn off my critique of a film. But I find that the better a movie is, the easier I find it to switch off any forensic critical analysis and live in its world. The shittier a movie is, the more it takes me out of it. I’m almost the same as any other audience member, it’s just that when I get taken out of a shitty movie, it’s sometimes because I can see the cogs working in the background and I see how something went wrong. Luckily, overall, I still have the ability to be a total fan, there’s something in my snake-brain that can still switch off any professional, granular analysis and just live in a universe.

 

HOTEL ARTEMIS is available on all home video platforms from November 26th.

Michael Coldwell

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