The sun is setting, but the day has just begun. It’s September 2019, and Total Film is at an anonymous logistics airport in Victorville, California. We’re here to watch nighttime filming on ‘Merry Go Round’, the shooting codename for Tenet – the latest big-budget blockbuster original from master filmmaker Christopher Nolan. All we know is that it’s an action epic, evolving from the world of international espionage. And that’s pretty much all we’ll know… for now.
As the orange sunset fades to black, Emma Thomas (Nolan’s wife and longtime producing partner) acts as our guide to the set, while preparations are made for a practical set-piece on an all-too-rare scale. Tonight, Victorville is doubling for Oslo. Blue lights strobe from ‘politi’ cars and an ‘ambulanse’, as a truck sprays the ground with water, replicating the rainy Norwegian capital.
Oh, and there’s the small matter of the 747 jet that’s been crashed into the side of a hangar. Not a partial fibreglass replica of a jet. Not CGI. This is a real aeroplane, bought by the production. It bears a (fictional) Norskfreight logo. Debris is scattered underneath, the top draped with shreds of hangar roof. The left wing, in particular, looks worse for wear. The scale is jaw-dropping.
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Denne historien er fra June 2020-utgaven av Total Film.
Start din 7-dagers gratis prøveperiode på Magzter GOLD for å få tilgang til tusenvis av utvalgte premiumhistorier og 9000+ magasiner og aviser.
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Snow Time to Die - Red One J.K. Simmons' Santa gets kidnapped. Luckily, Dwayne Johnson's on hand to save him...
If 2022's Violent Night gave us Die Hard in a Santa suit, Jake Kasdan's Red One could be retitled North Pole Has Fallen. The world imagined by Kasdan finds Saint Nick kidnapped two days before Christmas Eve. It's up to Dwayne Johnson's head of security, Callum Drift, and Chris Evans' unscrupulous hacker-for-hire, Jack O'Malley, to hunt down the man in red in time for the big day.
Back With a Vengeance - Sir Ridley Scott returns to the Colosseum with Gladiator II, the long-awaited sequel to the greatest historical epic of this century. Total Film meets the director and cast to discover how Maximus' legacy is echoing in eternity.
Ridley Scott is not a filmmaker to repeat himself. It's a trait that's all the more remarkable when you consider how prolific he's been over the nearly five decades since his feature debut, 1977's The Duellists. Alien prequels Prometheus and Alien: Covenant are the only times he's gone back to the same world, and those films are radical departures from the original.
Bad Romance - Timestalker Alice Lowe falls in love with the wrong man time and time again...
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STICKY SITUATION
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BORN TO BE WILD
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HUMPH DAY BOGART: LIFE COMES IN FLASHES
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