The title is stripped-down, like a sniper rifle ready to be concealed in a briefcase. But there are a lot of moving parts in the new movie from Richard Linklater, the veteran US indie filmmaker behind offbeat hits like School of Rock, Boyhood and the beloved romantic trilogy launched by Before Sunrise. Co-written by Linklater and his star Glen Powell, Hit Man is a literally killer comedy inspired by a 2001 magazine profile of a real guy from Houston, although it comes front-loaded with a ductile disclaimer: “Based on a somewhat true story.” 

When we first meet New Orleans college lecturer Gary (Powell), he is a faintly dorky dude with lank hair and glasses. He teaches psychology and philosophy to yawning students. His hobbies include birdwatching and electronics. He lives alone in the suburbs with two cats. It is certainly not the worst existence, but even Gary’s own voiceover narration seems aware that his life in the Big Easy lacks
much jazziness.

Get the latest news and insight into how the Big Issue magazine is made by signing up for the Inside Big Issue newsletter

Gary supplements his teaching income by maintaining surveillance equipment for the New Orleans police department. It is this side hustle which sets him on a surprising new trajectory. When a scuzzy undercover cop is suspended, his colleagues turn to Gary to take over in a sting. All he needs to do is pretend to be a hitman and elicit some damning testimony from the person who wants to hire him. 

How does a tech support guy pass as a stone-cold contract killer? Gary considers the many depictions of assassins-for-hire in pop culture and tries to “think hitman thoughts”. After a shaky start, it turns out he is a natural: smart and knowledgeable enough to sound like he can get away with murder, yet empathetic enough to put the “client” at ease. Arrests soar and suddenly Gary the dweeb is living an exciting double life.

Powell’s sculpted bod and jackknife grin were front and centre in Top Gun: Maverick and recent rom-com Anyone But You, so we know he can play sexy. But in Hit Man the Texan gets to show his range as well as his abs. 

His various killer personas include a gruff, bandana-sporting biker, a thickly-accented Eastern European heavy and just straight-up Christian Bale in American Psycho. Imagine Mr Benn if he only transformed into mugshot-ready murderers. His cop handlers are awed at Gary’s ability to convincingly embody badasses. “He’s like the Caucasian Idris,” one murmurs in admiration.

• Banshees of Inisherin star Kerry Condon: ‘You won’t be a beautiful human without empathy’
• Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley: ‘Why the hell are we still judging someone on how they look?’

But before you can say “he shoots, he scores”, Gary encounters a client who derails his winning streak. Madison (Adria Arjona) is desperately looking for a way to escape her abusive ex-husband, and murder feels like the only option. As slick, confident triggerman ‘Ron’, Gary manages to steer Madison away from incriminating herself, partly because he intuits she is a good person in a bad situation, and partly because they are flirting like crazy.

This is when Hit Man shifts gear again into rom-com territory, as Gary embarks on a relationship with Madison as cool lone wolf Ron while fretting that she would never be interested if she knew his true identity. For her part, Arjona plays Madison as someone who seems excited but a little perturbed to have clicked with a professional killer.

Things get complicated when the couple swap passionate private hook-ups for public socialising, risking bumping into people they know. When something unfortunate happens to Madison’s ex and she becomes a suspect, the film mutates again. Have we read the dynamics all wrong? Just who is playing who here? And just when you think you have a handle on this new situation, Hit Man shoots off in another direction.

Funny, sexy, surprising… this is what we used to call “a good time at the movies”. So it feels a shame that Hit Man is getting such a brief cinema release before it debuts on Netflix. But perhaps it will become such a palpable streaming hit that it inspires more movies in the same grown-up vein. Powell has already been announced as the lead in a reimagining of Warren Beatty’s Heaven Can Wait. But the real killer move would be to reunite him and Arjona in a remake of steamy cat-and-mouse caper The Thomas Crown Affair. Hopefully some smart producer out there will pull the trigger.

Hit Man is in cinemas now and on Netflix from 7 June. Graeme Virtue is a film and TV critic.

This article is taken from The Big Issue magazine, which exists to give homeless, long-term unemployed and marginalised people the opportunity to earn an income. To support our work buy a copy!

If you cannot reach your local vendor, you can still click HERE to subscribe to The Big Issue or give a gift subscription. You can also purchase one-off issues from The Big Issue Shop or The Big Issue app, available now from the App Store or Google Play.

Since Westerns first started weaving celluloid tales of cowboys and ‘Indians’ in the early 20th century, they have acted as a sort of origin story for the United States. “It’s a kind of justification” for the settlers’ treatment of Native American people, “and unbridled capitalism, as well, and lawlessness,” says actor and director Viggo Mortensen, best known as Aragorn in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy and for his starring role in David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence.

Relaxing in the plush foyer of a Glasgow hotel – having arrived to promote his own Western, The Dead Don’t Hurt, at the Glasgow Film Festival alongside co-star Solly McLeod – Mortensen admits he’s always been attracted to Westerns. “I grew up watching them,” he says. “I’m the first one to recognise that most Westerns are pretty simple and naive, and not terribly original stories, but occasionally, the best of the classic Westerns are on a level of the best poetry, the best tragedies written by human beings since ancient times.”

Get the latest news and insight into how the Big Issue magazine is made by signing up for the Inside Big Issue newsletter

It is to these heights Viggo Mortensen aspires with his brooding take on the Wild West. Set in the 1860s, The Dead Don’t Hurt stars Phantom Thread’s Vicky Krieps as fiercely independent French-Canadian woman Vivienne Le Coudy. She falls for Danish immigrant Holger Olsen (Mortensen) and the pair move to a frontier town in Nevada as the Civil War looms. When Holger decides to fight for the Union, Vivienne is left alone in a dangerous town, at the mercy of corrupt mayor (Danny Huston), his rancher business partner (Garret Dillahunt) and the rancher’s violent son (Solly McLeod). 

Mortensen not only stars in The Dead Don’t Hurt, he also wrote, directed and produced the film, as well as composing the score. He set out to be “respectful” of classic Westerns. “The story and the look of the people, the way they speak, the way they ride, the weapons – everything should feel real.” 

This meant meticulous attention to detail, and a crash revision course for his crew. “You must have sent me 30, 40, 50 films,” laughs McLeod. Just 24, the Orkney-born actor (previously seen as the eponymous hero in ITVX miniseries Tom Jones) grew up in a time when Westerns “just weren’t a thing”.

“I sent him a lot of movies saying, ‘I’m sorry, it’s really bad, you don’t have to watch all of it. But look at the way the guy puts on his hat, or how he rides a horse,’” Mortensen says. “Or to the set designer, I’d say, ‘Look at this. It’s a terrible movie but the saloon is amazing.’”

Its crew thus immersed in genre history, The Dead Don’t Hurt captures the dusty feel of the frontier, but it’s also quietly revolutionary. Viggo Mortensen has long been known for his political activism – he endorsed Bernie Sanders in 2016 and recently signed an open letter to president Joe Biden calling for an Israeli ceasefire – so he was always going to kick against the more reactionary side of this all-American mythology.

The Dead Don’t Hurt paints a truer picture of the melting pot of the West, says Mortensen, “full of people that don’t even speak English, or that speak English with an accent from another language”. But most noticeably of all, it puts a woman’s story centre stage. 

“Not only that, but when her male companion goes off to war, we don’t see a second of that, we stay with her,” he adds. “The goal was to tell a story about an unusual woman, who’s very stubbornly independent and strong-willed.”

• Cowbois: This ‘big queer Western’ is subverting macho tropes and celebrating gender outlaws
• Crimes of the future: Surgery is the new sex in Cronenberg’s latest ick-flick

Viewing the world from a female perspective goes a long way to upend the power dynamic of the traditional Western. There’s as much homesteading as there is gunslinging. The human consequences of the era’s lawlessness are thrown in sharp relief. Viggo Mortensen shows the brutality inherent in America’s origin story, thus reframing how the US got to where it is now. 

“The power and the impunity,” of the corrupt men in charge holds a particular parallel to current leaders, he says. “It’s not too hard to compare to Donald Trump and his offspring. The way they speak and feel empowered to do and say whatever they want. As long as they continue to not really pay a price for it, they’ll keep doing it.

“But this happens anywhere. You could talk about Vladimir Putin, and his brutal ambition and grotesque corruption. Whether it’s Trump or Putin, what do you do? You could be a completely non-violent person, but at a certain point you have to defend yourself or you have to defend law.”

For Mortensen, the first step is to stay informed. He “makes it a daily exercise” to review a range of news – including “really right-wing sources” – to give himself the tools to make up his own mind. “If you make that effort, you can find out what really might be happening.”

The Dead Don’t Hurt is in cinemas from 7 June.

This article is taken from The Big Issue magazine, which exists to give homeless, long-term unemployed and marginalised people the opportunity to earn an income. To support our work buy a copy!

If you cannot reach your local vendor, you can still click HERE to subscribe to The Big Issue or give a gift subscription. You can also purchase one-off issues from The Big Issue Shop or The Big Issue app, available now from the App Store or Google Play

Furiosa is a new film but it’s an old, almost primal, story.

The feverishly anticipated prequel to 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road, revs and roars into cinemas this week. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is the fifth film in the franchise, now spanning almost half a century and set in a dystopian wasteland where dwindled resources are fought over by rival – mostly vehicular-based – factions.

The first film, released in 1979, marked the arrival of one of cinema’s most original auteurs, George Miller. In a distant future that also feels increasingly familiar, characters battle for survival and redemption among the detritus of a collapsed society. The 45-year-old saga feels like it’s showing where we might end up in another half-century.

“They could be seen as cautionary tales,” Miller tells Big Issue. “These films are basically allegorical.

Get the latest news and insight into how the Big Issue magazine is made by signing up for the Inside Big Issue newsletter

“Way back when we made the first Mad Max, I was just making a film I’d be interested in. I didn’t have much understanding of the function of stories. It wasn’t until the first Mad Max succeeded globally that I realised we tapped into archetypes. The French were the first to describe them as ‘westerns on wheels’.”

The original film, made for next to nothing using real biker gangs with cars and costumes seemingly welded together from scraps, held the record for highest box-office-to-budget ratio for two decades until The Blair Witch Project came along. It was not only relatable internationally as a futuristic western; in Japan it felt like a Samurai story, in Scandinavia a Viking saga. Every culture has its equivalent.

“In a complex, chaotic world people tell stories, that are elemental with metaphorical resonances to be interpreted,” Miller continues. “They’re sort of timeless. They might be about the future but the behaviour goes back to the past. Sometimes the deep past. The world of Mad Max and Furiosa is medieval in many ways and yet they’re also somehow about what’s in the zeitgeist today.”

Miller was a doctor before making his directorial debut. Mad Max and its two direct sequels The Road Warrior and Beyond Thunderdome made an international star of Mel Gibson, who was replaced by Tom Hardy in the 2015 reboot where Max unwillingly teams up with Charlize Theron’s Furiosa to escape the wrath of Immortan Joe. 

As they are chased by a desperate convoy of crazies across the desert, there’s a sublime narrative stroke midpoint as they realise they have to turn around and motor back through the melee. It’s pure, visceral cinema. A film of fire, dust and insanity, simple and spectacular.

Miller has had a varied career. He was behind sheep-pig classic Babe and directed the all-singing, all-dancing, all-penguin Happy Feet animations. The return to Mad Max’s world was not an easy journey. Fury Road spent decades in development purgatory, its production was notoriously stormy – and its success defied all expectations. It won six Oscars, the most of any film that year. Metacritic, which tallies critics’ best-of lists found that Fury Road topped more lists of the best films of the last decade than any other. Furiosa has a hard act to follow. It does so by switching from taut action overload to grand epic.

Instead of Fury Road’s three-day timeline, Furiosa covers 15 years. A young Furiosa, played by Anya Taylor-Joy, is abducted from her family and, trying to get back home, is caught in the crossfire between two tyrants, one of whom – the warlord Dr Dementus – is played by Chris Hemsworth riding a chariot pulled by motorbikes.

• How Anya Taylor-Joy cornered the Complex Female Character market
• Venom: Let There Be Carnage is another missed opportunity for a superhero-horror crossover

Furiosa was filmed in the remote New South Wales outback. Of course, there’s nothing new about New South Wales or the rest of Australia. We may have only found it a few hundred years ago but the continent is home to the oldest extant culture on the planet. 

“The Indigenous Australian culture goes back at least 60,000 years,” Miller says. “I was privileged to spend some time in Indigenous communities, particularly in Central Australia, and was struck by the power of their storytelling. They weren’t decorative, they were as practical as the GPS on our phone.

“In some parts, those narratives glue societies together and explain everything about the cosmos they live in. How the Earth and stars were formed, where they can find water, find food. All of that is in their paintings, their dance.”

Miller cites Joseph Campbell, the American academic who studied the parallels between the stories and myths told by different cultures across history. “He spent 40 years in a library collating all the stories of humankind and seeing where they overlapped and seeing what they have in common,” Miller explains. “He said that each story is basically in response to its times, but there are universal tropes and themes that go back to the earliest recorded stories.”

Miller has some ancient tales in his DNA. His family was originally from Greece, and anglicised their surname from Miliotis to Miller on emigration to Australia in 1920. Miller sees how his Greek heritage, mixed with the even older traditions of the ‘New World’ have shaped his work. “All those vectors certainly have an influence on my storytelling,” he says.

“The fact that I have Greek heritage has made me think about the early Greeks, from Aristotle and Plato. A lot of us are still working to the observations they made about drama and the purpose of drama. We’re still seeing in Marvel and DC movies the mythologies from all across the globe and across all time in new forms.”

The fact that humans are hardwired for stories has been Miller’s mantra for decades. You only have to scroll through any social media platform of your choice to see there are more stories being told by more people than ever before. But instead of making sense of the chaos, the sheer volume of stories has become the chaos. Has the noise of billions of people each with their own tale corrupted and polluted the power of storytelling?

“Our storytelling, whatever form it takes, has to reflect the very chaos we are dealing with. The way we negotiate and navigate the world is through story. Every person on social media is trying to engage through story – it only has meaning if it’s received. Our job is to find the signal in the noise.

Big Issue is demanding an end to poverty this general election. Will you sign our open letter to party leaders?

“I believe that’s why we resort to more elemental stories for that simple reason. It’s always been the case. How would you explain a tsunami or volcano in the past? If you didn’t know the basic physics of how the earth orbits around the sun, there’s no way to explain the seasons. So you have to invent stories about how they come about.

“I don’t think we have any choice – it’s who we are, it’s the way we exist in the world,” Miller continues. “Every footstep you take, every corner you turn, every cultural artefact you encounter – and even going back further the geological history of how the mountains you climb were made. All of that is part of the mosaic of the human narrative.”

Furiosa is in cinemas from 24 May.

This article is taken from The Big Issue magazine, which exists to give homeless, long-term unemployed and marginalised people the opportunity to earn an income.

To support our work buy a copy! If you cannot reach your local vendor, you can still click HERE to subscribe to The Big Issue today or give a gift subscription to a friend or family member.

When was the last time you consciously thought about Garfield, the heroically lazy cartoon cat for
longer than a split second? For me it was in 2012 when Andrew Garfield was starring in blockbuster reboot The Amazing Spider-Man. 

My hot take was telling people Garfield had been cast as the nimble wall-crawler because the producers assumed he already had suction pads on his hands and feet. Judging by the lukewarm reaction to that excellent joke, it felt like Garfield’s cultural chokehold – symbolised by those grinning soft toys that clung to the back window of many a Vauxhall Cavalier – was slipping.

But if Garfield (the cat, not the Oscar-nominated actor) is famous for anything it is his prodigious appetite for carb-heavy foods. So after two slapstick-heavy live-action movies in the mid-2000s – where an unsettling computer-generated Garfield voiced by Bill Murray interacted with mugging humans – the self-satisfied moggy has now returned for another helping in The Garfield Movie.

Get the latest news and insight into how the Big Issue magazine is made by signing up for the Inside Big Issue newsletter

The previous two films were a cheerfully clumsy mish-mash; this time round everything feels like it has been optimised to achieve maximum impact, right down to that newly definitive title. Perhaps there were some executive nerves when adapting a cartoon strip that has barely changed since creator Jim Davis first secured newspaper syndication for it in 1978. 

This fully computer-generated Garfield film has been primped, preened and puffed out with high-
profile voices so it can compete at the multiplex in 2024. 

While this incarnation of the tubby orange tabby sounds like Chris Pratt rather than Murray, he still loves lasagne, hates Mondays and prides himself on being an elite-level loafer. Garfield’s leisurely mastery of his domestic domain extends to breaking the fourth wall while his drippy owner Jon (voiced by Nicholas Hoult) and puppyish sidekick Odie cater to his sultan-like levels of selfishness.

Perhaps wisely The Garfield Movie unmoors its lead from his mollycoddled life by quickly kidnapping him away from it. It is all because of the wayward father who abandoned him as a kitten five years ago. 

The square-shouldered, unkempt Vic is a disreputable but amiable crook voiced by Samuel L Jackson, and much is made of the difference between dad’s streetwise outdoor cat life and Garfield’s gilded indoor cage of near-constant pizza delivery.

• Filming will begin on Paddington 3 next year as its director and title is confirmed
• From feral to floof ball: The incredible evolution of cats

Vic is in serious hock to a vengeful Persian cat crime boss named Jinx (Hannah Waddingham) whose lavish necklace of mood rings telegraphs her volcanic temper. To get out from under her paw, Vic and his reluctant sidekicks Garfield and Odie must rob a far-off milk farm whose cutesy rustic exterior disguises a grim industrial operation of automated conveyer belts and aggressive security systems.

Their inside man is an old bull who has been put out to pasture nearby. This beefy beast is voiced by Mission: Impossible mainstay Ving Rhames, so of course there is an elaborate planning briefing before the milk heist is executed. 

The soulful bull also has a wise plan to help Vic and Garfield get over the resentments that have built up over the past five years. By the time the robbery is in full antic swing, the father and son seem to be achieving some sort of belated rapprochement. 

Big Issue is demanding an end to poverty this general election. Will you sign our open letter to party leaders?

But mature life lessons being learned amid an Aardman-lite factory heist also feels like we have wandered far away from whatever made Garfield so globally popular in the first place.

At least the stylised aesthetic is sharp enough to evoke the familiar clean lines and huge eyes of Davis’s original artwork but rubbery enough to allow the action sequences to crank up to literally cartoonish levels, including a climactic high-speed train showdown over a deep Roadrunner-style canyon. There is also a cameo from Snoop Dogg voicing a street cat, which is a good joke. 

But at no point does anything truly spark to life. I love a dumbass Despicable Me movie or an emotionally wrenching Pixar film. But despite some thinking out of the box, The Garfield Movie does not make a particularly convincing case for its existence. Perhaps Garfield should stick to his more natural habitats, like appearing in a classic three-panel comic strip or being shonkily printed onto a cheap grey sweatshirt you foolishly consider buying while backpacking.

The Garfield Movie is in cinemas from 24 May.

Graeme Virtue is a film and TV critic.

This article is taken from The Big Issue magazine, which exists to give homeless, long-term unemployed and marginalised people the opportunity to earn an income. To support our work buy a copy!

If you cannot reach your local vendor, you can still click HERE to subscribe to The Big Issue or give a gift subscription. You can also purchase one-off issues from The Big Issue Shop or The Big Issue app, available now from the App Store or Google Play.

Were you ever tempted by the once-ubiquitous online ads for Masterclass or BBC Maestro? The gimmick is essentially deluxe YouTube tutorials. Stumping up enough cash gets you access to video courses with celebrity teachers staring right down the lens at you. That means seven hours of Garry Kasparov improving your chess game. Five hours of vegetarian cooking explained by Marco Pierre White. Six hours of one-on-one acting tutelage with Helen Mirren. 

Martin Scorsese recorded a filmmaking seminar for Masterclass in 2018 (comprising 30 bitesize lessons, around four and a half hours in total). With the greatest respect to his fellow instructors like Bill Clinton, Ringo Starr and Mariah Carey, he is clearly a god-level guru: knowledgeable, passionate, eloquent, vastly experienced and – like the best teachers – just a little bit intimidating. 

Get the latest news and insight into how the Big Issue magazine is made by signing up for the Inside Big Issue newsletter

In the new documentary Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger, you get a two-hour-plus hit of pure Scorsese in enthusiastic educator mode as he pays heartfelt tribute to his formative influences. Because as far back as he can remember he always wanted to be a filmmaker. Here, he persuasively makes the case that Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger – the English director and Hungarian screenwriter whose overlapping creative alchemy led to a remarkable run of films in the 1940s and 1950s – unlocked that desire in him. 

Made in England, directed by David Hinton but essentially hosted by the 81-year-old Scorsese, is a vigorous work of film scholarship that touches on all aspects of Powell and Pressburger’s careers, from their early UK war-time efforts like The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) to their sumptuous imperial-phase masterpieces like Black Narcissus (1947) and The Red Shoes (1948). It also takes an unvarnished look at their attempts to work with hands-on Hollywood producers, which resulted in the back-to-back 1950 bombs The Elusive Pimpernel and Back to Earth. 

But the documentary also functions as a Scorsese autobiography. He made his first connection with Powell as an asthmatic indoor kid for whom films offered escapism; he was enthralled by swashbuckling technicolour extravaganza The Thief of Baghdad (1940) co-directed by Powell, even via the suboptimal experience of watching it on the family’s black-and-white TV. 

• Greed, betrayal and exploitation: The cruel true story behind Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon
• What Scorsese epic Killers of the Flower Moon means to an Indigenous street paper vendor

Scorsese’s own film-making career rapidly achieved lift-off and here he recalls seeking out his hero Powell during a visit to the UK in 1975. The once acclaimed director had fallen on hard times but seemed touched that a young firebrand of the New Hollywood movement was so appreciative of his work. It sparked a new chapter in Powell’s professional and personal life – he relocated to the US and ended up marrying Scorsese’s regular editor Thelma Schoonmaker. 

That close connection adds an extra emotional charge to Made in England, although at times it does resemble a particularly exuberant film studies tutorial. Scorsese takes great care to point out the stylistic flourishes that bled into his own work: how the meticulous build-up to a sabre duel in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp is echoed in De Niro’s hunched walkout to the ring in Raging Bull (1980) or how the intense colour shifts amid the Himalayan nun freakouts of Black Narcissus are echoed in the similarly fraught Mean Streets (1973). 

Perhaps inevitably, more of the emphasis falls on Powell – an eccentric and loveable raconteur – than his more circumspect collaborator, although in the vintage interviews showcased here it is often Pressburger who nonchalantly delivers a killer line. It was also Powell alone who made Peeping Tom (1960), the transgressive proto-slasher movie that scandalised UK film critics and sentenced him to a period of unemployment Hollywood now calls “movie jail”, even if its lurid tale of a compulsive
filmmaker-turned-killer clearly still thrills Scorsese. 

Thanks in no small part to Scorsese’s championing, the work of Powell and Pressburger was rediscovered and reassessed in the 1980s, thankfully while they were still alive to enjoy some appreciation from a new generation of audiences. When discussing the ravishing The Red Shoes, Scorsese describes it as a film now “gloriously vindicated by history” but that could be applied to Powell and Pressburger’s legacy as a whole. 

When considering Scorsese’s own obsessions and filmography, you do not immediately think of happy endings. But he worked tirelessly to engineer one for his heroes, and this elegant documentary is the icing on that celebratory cake. 

Room for more 

Powell and Pressburger followed up the opulent The Red Shoes with a bleak, black-and-white tale of wartime bomb disposal, alcoholism and domestic strife starring David Farrar and Kathleen Byron (reuniting after Black Narcissus). Often overlooked, The Small Back Room (1949) is a Scorsese favourite and will be rereleased soon in a new 4K restoration. 

This article is taken from The Big Issue magazine, which exists to give homeless, long-term unemployed and marginalised people the opportunity to earn an income. To support our work buy a copy!

Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger is in cinemas now. The Small Back Room screens at the BFI, London on 28 May; on Blu-ray and digital from 3 June 

If you cannot reach your local vendor, you can still click HERE to subscribe to The Big Issue today or give a gift subscription to a friend or family member. You can also purchase one-off issues from The Big Issue Shop or The Big Issue app, available now from the App Store or Google Play

A group of Liverpudlians sit in a circle, discussing their experiences of addiction. Then the camera zooms out. This is not a therapy session, but a readthrough. The scene captures the essence of Stephen, the new feature film by Melanie Manchot. Its Matryoshka structure follows the production of a film inspired by 1901’s Arrest of Goudie, both the first film made in Liverpool and the first crime reconstruction, about Thomas Goudie, who embezzled £170,000 (£22m today) from the bank where he worked to repay gambling debts. In the diegetic film, relocated to the 1990s, Goudie is played by Stephen Giddings, who himself has experience of alcohol addiction. And Stephen Giddings is played by himself.

Get the latest news and insight into how the Big Issue magazine is made by signing up for the Inside Big Issue newsletter

“It originated through another video art project that I worked on from 2010-2011 that came about through an invitation to think about addiction and recovery,” Manchot says. “Stephen was part of a group of people in an alcohol recovery programme in Liverpool called SHARP who joined the project voluntarily. He was by far the youngest – he was 26 at the time. But the moment he stood in front of the camera, it was like, wow – this huge transformation.”

After the project, Giddings enrolled in acting classes, but then went to university – the first in his family to do so – to study mental health nursing, but he retained a dream of performing in a film, just once. So Manchot made it happen.

“Filmmaking has an incredible capacity to be a tool in recovery,” she says, offering “a way of fabulating stories about yourself that are different, so you can look back and think, ‘Oh, I could be like that – this is another version of me.’”

It is also “inherently collective, and the impact of creating something collectively is phenomenal. It really gives people a sense of purpose. And one thing that is known in addiction recovery is that you don’t recover on your own, and you need a sense of purpose.”

All 16 cast members are themselves in recovery, and their experiences fed into the script. Pre-production began in early 2020. When the UK went into lockdown, Manchot was concerned: “For people in addiction, being told to isolate is the worst thing that could happen.” But she and the cast regrouped whenever possible, and “it was like family – people were so together and so connected”.

• Families are the invisible victims of addiction forgotten by our healthcare system
• Women in North East of England nearly twice as likely to die early from suicide, addiction or domestic homicide

Isolation recurs thematically within the film, as in one striking scene in which Goudie sits physically with but mentally adrift from loved ones at a pub during a Liverpool game. But these moments are bracketed by others in which the creative process – auditions, rehearsals, the reviewing of rushes – provides opportunities for reintegration and transformation.

“Addiction is very much a breakdown of connection,” Manchot says, “and it is the reestablishment of connections that allows people to move out of addiction into recovery, and hopefully stay in recovery.”

As well as cinemas, the film is visiting exhibition spaces across the UK, where it will be accompanied by a multi-channel installation that focuses on the supporting cast’s experience of producing the film, featuring practices that “come out of both therapy and acting exercises”.

Given this overt connection between recovery and creativity, Manchot is troubled by the impact of cuts to healthcare and the arts. “The results of what’s happening now will play out over the next 10 years,” she says.

“It’s so myopic, and it’s so problematic, because it takes a huge amount of energy and potential and contribution out of our society. People in recovery are often highly spirited people, and if only society was able to see that more clearly, they could be much better reintegrated. Doing something that gives us a sense of purpose is pleasurable to ourselves, but it also helps other people. I think not realising this is devastating.”

Big Issue is demanding an end to poverty this general election. Will you sign our open letter to party leaders?

Oldham actor Mark Newsome is living proof of this sentiment. He trained at Oldham Theatre Workshop for six years from the age of 15, then attended the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, graduating in 2014.

“I signed with a really good agent, but then my mental health declined,” he says. For “about five or six years, I wasn’t really working, and auditions weren’t coming in, and I had real problems with drink and drugs. I was arrested about six, seven times. I got sent to court on two separate occasions, and they were threatening me with prison.

“Then I got a letter from this theatre who’d seen me behaving really badly that said, ‘You need to keep away.’ That really struck a chord, because I was like, ‘This is starting to really affect my career’ – even though it probably already was. My career’s always been everything to me and what I’m really passionate about.

“In 2017, it came to a bit of a head in Blackpool. I had the intention of taking my life there.”

But, thanks to a call with his best friend, he survived. A year later, he opened Blackpool, What A Shit Place to Die, a one-man play about his experience written by Phil Pearson, “and it just did really well. That was a real turning point in my life,” as was receiving an autism diagnosis at 29. “I finally realised why I was struggling so much,” he says.

Having once faced the prospect of incarceration, he was cast as a neurodivergent prisoner in Screw, then as a police officer in Coronation Street. He became an ambassador for the Prince’s Trust and CALM and is now in the process of adapting Blackpool, What A Shit Place to Die into a short film as a gateway for a future feature.

He has also been sober for a year. “I am going to fuck up in the future – that’s natural,” he says. “I’m not cured. But I’m better equipped now to deal with those things.” The arts have played a significant role in his recovery, and he considers it “an honour” to be able repay the favour through his own work. “When you’re going through it, it’s so isolating, and it can feel like you’re the only person in the world who’s going through that,” he says, “but there are so many people out there that are struggling.”

Stephen is in cinemas now. The installation is on at The Exchange in Newlyn, Cornwall, followed by a nationwide exhibition tour

This article is taken from The Big Issue magazine, which exists to give homeless, long-term unemployed and marginalised people the opportunity to earn an income.

To support our work buy a copy! If you cannot reach your local vendor, you can still click HERE to subscribe to The Big Issue today or give a gift subscription to a friend or family member.

She-Hulk and Orphan Black star Tatiana Maslany talks harnessing fears and the environmental message of her new animated film, Butterfly Tale.

The Big Issue: Could you introduce us to Jennifer, your character in Butterfly Tale?

Tatiana Maslany: Jennifer is a monarch butterfly who is setting off on the great migration from southern Canada to Mexico. But the problem is she is afraid of heights. We see her deal with that as the story goes on.

Are there aspects of the story and the character that you could relate to?

I loved the idea of her being someone who looks to be on top of everything, and is sort of prickly, but on the inside is little, soft and fearful – afraid of the very thing she is built to do.

Is that how you could describe yourself? Tough on the outside, soft on the inside?

Oh, for sure, totally. I feel like performers can relate to that. I still have stage fright, which is such a wild thing after 30 years of acting. But that fear can also be the thing that charges you and makes performing so electric.

Have you learned how to harness that fear? Please share your tips!

First off, knowing that fear is not necessarily the worst thing to feel, that it’s understandable. Also just breathing is a big thing for me. When you feel that fear you jump up into your head. And then you freeze. I get cold, I get shaky, all of that. Trying to breathe into your body is probably a good way to do it. This works sometimes, it does not work all the time.

You have a background in improv. Surely that’s where you’d get the worst kind of stage fright?

That’s where I felt the stage fright most acutely. I still get nervous if I do improv but there’s something about the joy of being on stage and creating with other people, especially when you trust them. It’s such a contradictory thing, but it is the biggest thrill. And doing it with an audience who’s also not sure, and you’re all building something together. It’s very collective and exciting.

Was there a time in your life where you learned that a difference was actually a strength?

Absolutely. Simply as an actor who came to LA from Regina, Saskatchewan and who didn’t have the polish or the look or the blah blah blah of what LA wanted. I didn’t fit. And I was so lucky I got Orphan Black where I could express the weirdest side of me. I got to really play and do what I want to do as an actor. Difference being something that can allow you to see things differently. That’s such a cliché but seeing things from a unique perspective actually allows you to problem solve a different way.

Is being different essential in your industry when you have to stand out from the crowd?

I don’t feel like everybody’s allowed to do that. You look at like somebody like Willem Defoe, who is such a character and is so beloved for who he is and how strange he is. The industry is very literal in so many ways. There’s potential for more interesting points of view and more interesting characters than sometimes we’re allowed to do. It’s an art form about humanity and stories. Why would you want the same people to be playing those stories?

Did you learn any other lessons from Butterfly Tale?

I feel like it alerted me to the migration of monarch butterflies – what that is, how important that is and how threatened that is. I’m very aware of climate change. In the movie, it’s threaded through. There are weather patterns upsetting their trajectory and that’s climate change. I hope kids are able to discuss it with their parents or get curious about it. The film really makes you empathise with these little creatures that are just doing the thing that they were born to do. That’s happening all over. That’s why flowers are blooming and that’s why we get fruit. It’s magical and it’s totally real.

Are kids more in tune to the wonders of the natural world while adults are too self-obsessed?

I think kids are definitely more in tune with that stuff. And I don’t think it’s an accident that we are made to not notice these things anymore. We know what’s happening, but there are so many things built to distract and to absolve fossil fuel companies of their absolute responsibility in it. There are massive companies that need to be held accountable. It is overwhelming, and that overwhelm is integral to them continuing to do what they do and erode the planet. I’m hoping that kids are more aware, more awake than we are.

Butterfly Tale is out now in cinemas.

“I had no idea I was making something that was going to be so current,” says director Simon Chambers, whose moving, often funny film Much Ado About Dying documents his time as one of the UK’s millions of unpaid carers, looking after his eccentric Uncle David at the end of his life. A retired, gay actor with numerous health issues, David is living in squalor in his London flat, which he accidentally sets on fire, leading him to become homeless and reliant on Chambers for his care. Despite this hardship, Uncle David remains spirited, comparing his plight to his beloved King Lear – the Shakespeare tragedy about an old man growing old, infirm and mad.

Chambers never intended to make a film about his uncle. When David first asked for help, he initially brought his camera along to keep the peace between them. “I don’t know if you know any actors,” he laughs, “but they never seem to be happier than when they have got an audience. It meant we got on better with each other.” In tense moments, the camera acts like a mediator. David recites Shakespeare monologues from memory, or turns his chastising of Chambers into a song and dance, happy knowing that there’s someone at the other side of the lens watching him perform.

Get the latest news and insight into how the Big Issue magazine is made by signing up for the Inside Big Issue newsletter

David’s anarchic spirit remains intact as his physical health deteriorates and he loses the ability to walk. Although Chambers loves his uncle for his unconventional ways (“I was always having to help him out of scrapes,” he laughs fondly) this proves frustrating when he’s trying to do practical things for him. “There’s one bit in the film where I say that sometimes I wish he’d died in the fire,” Chambers says. “I’ve had people who have been carers for family members saying, I’m so glad you put that in. Because you do feel like that, even though you love these people. Sometimes you just think it would have made things simpler.” 

Eventually, thanks to David’s savings, Chambers is able to pay for a specialist care home for his uncle – Denville Hall, a retirement home for actors which counts Richard Attenborough and David Warner among its previous residents. “Actors have a very broad range of emotional expression, which you see at the home,” Chambers explains. “They come into the room going, ‘Oh! It’s absolute heaven!’ So over the top! It was always good fun, even when people were ill. Some of them had dementia, so every day they came in and said, ‘Have I ever told you you’ve got a marvellous view?!’ It can be sad, but at the same time, they’re making the best of it, and that’s what David did.”

• Carers Week: Eldercare is the new childcare, and carers need new rights
• ‘It’s too much pressure’: Covid leaves young carers burnt out, lonely and lacking support

When he was looking after David, Chambers was one of a huge number of people in the country with caring responsibilities. Census data from 2021 estimates 5.7 million people in the UK are unpaid carers, but Carers UK research says it could be up to 10.6 million. “There’s this huge crisis in social care,” Chambers says. “It’s a hidden part of our society – people like you and me who are looking after someone that can’t get any care from the state. The film is showing the experience of an undervalued, underrepresented, invisible workforce that our society relies upon.” According to research, 12,000 people a day become unpaid carers, with one in seven people in the workplace currently juggling work and care – and yet, like death, it’s still often an under-discussed aspect of life.

Chambers wants the film to spark wider conversations about these big subjects, but he also hopes it provides comfort and empathy for people with caring experience. He’s inviting charities like Carers UK and Marie Curie to come along to screenings, as well as death doulas and “death cafes” – groups where death can be discussed in an informal setting – to share their experiences and knowledge at Q&As.

“Death is something that is hidden away from us more and more,” he says. “They used to lay grandad on the kitchen table 150 years ago, and now some people sneak in with a box and sneak out again. Death is alienated from us.”

In the film’s final scenes, David is physically frail but sharp with clarity, stating that he has never understood life as clearly as he does just before death. Has making the film changed Chambers’ understanding of life and death? “What I realise is that I had got a little bit too serious about my life,” he reflects. “So many people I know feel anxiety and stress the whole time. But David had this playfulness in his life, and it’s from seeing his life like a play. Our lives are just a story. And if you see it as a story, at least you’re not going to torture yourself with regrets.”

“I’m not worried or scared about dying, and I think that’s what David gave me, and what he gives the audience, by talking through his dying,” Chambers says. “The actor’s job is to reflect our lives back on us, but normally in film, it’s either a violent death or very passive. But David talks us through the whole thing. I think the more you can be around good deaths, the less you’re going to be frightened of it. You accept it as a part of life.”

Much Ado About Dying is in cinemas now.

This article is taken from The Big Issue magazine, which exists to give homeless, long-term unemployed and marginalised people the opportunity to earn an income.

To support our work buy a copy! If you cannot reach your local vendor, you can still click HERE to subscribe to The Big Issue today or give a gift subscription to a friend or family member.

“Some people say less is more… I am not one of those people.” Rose Glass is a startling filmmaker, but this is the least surprising statement she’s made. We’re at Glasgow Film Festival, the morning after her wild new movie Love Lies Bleeding has received a rapturous welcome at its UK premiere, and the fast-rising writer-director is explaining her desire to always “take a big swing”.

If you saw her first feature, the chilling horror Saint Maud, you’ll already know Glass’s palette runs to the shocking, the lurid, the eccentric, the melodramatic. Featuring elements of both body and religious horror, the English director’s debut was an unnerving story of faith, madness, death and salvation in the fading seaside town of Scarborough. It signalled the arrival of a serious new talent.

Her second finds us in a very different genre – set in the dusty hinterlands of New Mexico, Love Lies Bleeding traces its lineage through Americana and blood-splashed revenge thrillers, but is every bit as heightened as its predecessor. Kristen Stewart stars as Lou, a lonely gym manager who falls hard for Jackie, a driven bodybuilder who drifts through on her way to pursue her musclebound dreams in Las Vegas (played with energetic commitment by actress, martial artist and former police officer Katy O’Brian). The pair are soon shacked up together, enjoying egg white omelettes and lots of vivid, sweaty sex. But their love nest isn’t to last, and soon Lou’s criminal family pull the couple into a seamy underworld of violence, drugs, betrayal and murder.

“Coming off the back of Saint Maud, I just really wanted to take some risks,” says Glass. “And, I guess, try something I wasn’t totally sure I could pull off or not. So that’s how it ended up wading into some crazy, thriller sort of territory. But the initial story hook was just that I really liked the idea of doing a film about an incredibly muscular woman. And looking at how and why she got like that. It seemed like psychologically interesting kind of territory.”

Since bodybuilder Steve Reeves starred in 1958’s Hercules, through Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson, all the way up to the mega-stars of the Marvel universe, we’ve been used to seeing male film stars who know their way around the free weights. But for women, getting buff is still “a subversive act”, says Glass. “There’s just so many more complicated and often negative reactions associated with female muscularity. Male muscularity is celebrated. Female muscularity still shocks some people.”

Glass’s interest in muscley women predates the return of lycra-clad, Saturday-night heroes the Gladiators, though the timing of the film’s release not long after the BBC successfully brought the series back is an interesting coincidence.

In fact, the inspiration for Love Lies Bleeding goes back to the very beginnings of female bodybuilding to pioneering American bodybuilder Lisa Lyon. The first women’s world champion of bodybuilding, Lyon notably worked with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe in the early 80s to create a series of erotic images that still challenge traditional assumptions about female beauty and strength. Lyon sadly died in September 2023, but her image at the peak of her Playboy-featured success lives on in Jackie’s styling – right down to her mop of curls.

During research and writing, Glass fell for the “self-expressive, performance” side of bodybuilding. That respect for the sport comes through in the film, but the diminutive director never did go as far as to start lifting herself. “At one point in when I was writing, I was like, I’m gonna use this as motivation to get really fit and healthy,” she smiles. “Instead, I didn’t. I was a bit more like Lou, so I was constantly just trying and failing to quit smoking.”

Like Saint Maud, Love Lies Bleeding ratchets up and up to a truly eye-popping finale. We won’t ruin it for you here, but suffice to say it cements Glass as a leading light in the new generation of genre film auteurs. Gratifyingly, some of the most daring of these young writer-directors are women. Along with Glass, we have both Emerald Fennell (Saltburn, Promising Young Woman) and Julia Ducournau (Raw, Titane). This is cause for some celebration, particularly in an industry in which female talent is still desperately under-represented behind the camera. In 2023, women made up just 16% of directors and 17% of writers on the top 250 grossing US films, according to the Celluloid Ceiling Report. It’s exciting to think things may be starting to change, Glass says.

• Lee Grant: I wasn’t scared when I was blacklisted. I am now
• From The Iron Claw to Opponent: How wrestling films began grappling with real issues
• Io Capitano director Matteo Garrone on why a refugee’s journey is so much more than small boats

“I can only speak for myself,” she explains, “and I’m still coming from a fairly privileged, white-middle-class kind of standpoint, but I’ve certainly felt very supported and encouraged throughout my career. I’m sure that’s hugely benefiting from much tougher experiences other women had in the past, where they haven’t been afforded the same kind of opportunity. It definitely feels like I’ve had a good experience, and I hope that I hope that many, many more women continue to do so.”

Hear, hear. For her part, Glass confirms she’s already “writing a thing, which I’m very excited about”. Will it be another big swing? “Oh, yes. In a different way to this one. I think if you’re not scaring yourself a little bit, then what’s the point?”

Love Lies Bleeding is in cinemas now.

Yes, it’s another film where Liam Neeson’s armed with a gun on the poster. But In the Land of Saints
and Sinners, coming to Netflix this week, is more thoughtful and grounded than most. As a gang of terrorists hide out in a small village in County Donegal, they cross paths with Neeson’s Finbar Murphy, a former hitman pulled out of retirement to defend his community, and perhaps find redemption along the way. The film stars Irish acting royalty including Ciarán Hinds, Colm Meaney and Game of Thrones’ Jack Gleeson, all facing off against a ruthless Kerry Condon.

The role is the complete opposite of Siobhán, the sister of Colin Farrell’s character in The Banshees of Inisherin, which earned Condon an Oscar nomination. She calls the Big Issue from Abu Dhabi, where she’s filming a Formula 1 film with Brad Pitt, Javier Bardem and Lewis Hamilton as himself.

THE BIG ISSUE: Are you travelling the world following Formula 1?

Kerry Condon: We’re just doing some other stuff before we start following the Grand Prix in the summer. We started last year at Silverstone, then there was the actor strikes so we had to pause and now we’re starting again in Abu Dhabi.

Does an Oscar nomination mean you get to pick and choose projects and end up in places like Abu Dhabi?

Does an Oscar nomination change things? Yes, in the sense that a lot more projects are coming to me and that I don’t have to audition any more. That’s very nice. It all happened so fast from the moment [Banshees] got released in August to the Oscars. It felt like a whirlwind. I remember wishing that I could pause the whole world for a few days just so my brain could catch up.

Get the latest news and insight into how the Big Issue magazine is made by signing up for the Inside Big Issue newsletter

Have you worked on any other upcoming projects that you’re probably not allowed to talk about?

Funnily enough while that roller coaster for Banshees was happening, at the same time I was filming a Star Wars TV show. I think that’s going to come out in November-December. It’s called Skeleton
Crew. The leads are children and I loved it so much, it was just really innocent and fun. 

• The Banshees of Inisherin is a curious tonic for these bleak times
• Memory: Another outing for Liam Neeson’s cool black coat

In the Land of Saints and Sinners is out this week. Can you introduce us to your character Doireann?

This character, regardless of her political views, is an unhinged, angry person. Her brother goes missing so that’s the catalyst for her getting riled up. Liam’s character isn’t exactly… I mean it’s in the title, he isn’t exactly sin free either. So I knew my role within the story. I’m a villain.

Is playing a villain helped when it’s Liam Neeson you’re up against?

No. Initially, I was a bit like, oh, jeez, my work’s going to be cut out for me because Liam Neeson’s really tall. Tall to a regular person, and I’m pretty small, so he’s really tall compared to me. When I’m standing beside him the audience have to believe that Liam would feel me as a threat. 

Then I remembered various villains in the past that I was affected by, like Joe Pesci in Goodfellas. They might not have been physically menacing but there was something about them that was really nerve-wrecking. Personalities that feel a little unhinged, and unpredictable. So I started to tap into that.

Did that come easily, are you a naturally menacing person?

I’m not at all. It did come easy to me, in a way. I really enjoyed it. And it made me think that sometimes your empathy can be a little crippling, because you can feel really sad for people when you can’t do anything to help them. When I played this character who says what she thinks, it was really relaxing not having to think about the other person’s feelings. I mean, obviously you can’t be like that, you should worry about other people’s feelings. But to play it for a couple of months was fun. 

Ask me about my appearance. How did I come up with my menacing appearance – that’s what you should ask me.

How did you come up with your menacing appearance?

I was telling you about the height and all of that, I remembered the mother in The Goonies was a strange-looking person. I thought about the idea that people who think negative things, physically they’re not smiley and bright and their energy isn’t nice. All these negative thoughts and negative vibrations manifest in your body. I wanted to not be pretty. I went with one of the Manson girls for the hair. I saw a picture and there was something a little creepy and so I ran with that idea.

Were you glad when it was over and you could stop being intimidating?

I wasn’t in a big rush. It’s harder to play a sensitive character. It’s draining, it’s hard to feel sad and sensitive all the time.

The more you talk about it, the more tempting it seems to switch empathy off.

Don’t do that! Because then you won’t be a beautiful human being and what’ll the world come to if none of us care about anybody?

Doesn’t the world seem like it’s already on the way there?

I hate to think so. It’s great for a few seconds to be able to go – you know what, you’re annoying, fuck off. But ultimately, you’ll end up alone.

Kerry Condon stars in In the Land of Saints and Sinners, available to watch on Netflix from 26 April.

This article is taken from The Big Issue magazine, which exists to give homeless, long-term unemployed and marginalised people the opportunity to earn an income. To support our work buy a copy!

If you cannot reach your local vendor, you can still click HERE to subscribe to The Big Issue today or give a gift subscription to a friend or family member. You can also purchase one-off issues from The Big Issue Shop or The Big Issue app, available now from the App Store or Google Play