Melissa McCarthy, Tiffany Haddish and Elisabeth Moss take over the mafia in The Kitchen, a gangster story that’s upending conventions in more ways than one. Total Film gets the inside story on the mob thriller that feels a long time coming…
Who says women can’t play gangsters?” Director Andrea Berloff has been asking the same question for years, but she’s always known the answer. The mob genre is as old as Hollywood itself, and it’s just as much of a boys’ club. Wives, molls, strippers and mamas are all well and good, but if you want to be a real wiseguy, you better have the stugots to go with it. Until now, that is.
“We all know what a mafia story looks like, but seeing it from a woman’s perspective – not as a comedy or as a joke, but in a really grounded, gritty, intense, dramatic way – that was something entirely different,” says Berloff, speaking to Total Film in LA. “I just wanted to challenge every aspect of it. This was my chance to turn everything on its head.”
Back in February 2016, Berloff had just lost out on an Oscar for her screenplay for Straight Outta Compton, when an unknown British graphic novel landed on her desk. The story of three women who take over the Irish mafia in the mid ’70s after their husbands get sent to prison – a Scorsese-nodding New York crime thriller about life on the streets of Berloff’s old neighbourhood in Hell’s Kitchen – the book spoke to everything that she wanted to keep saying after Compton. “I found a lot of the same social issues and I found a whole lot of new ones. I sort of fell in love with it, but I also immediately started pulling out different storylines and side characters. Not because there was anything wrong with the graphic novel, but I sort of felt like if I was going to get my one crack at telling this fantastic, big, female-driven story, I was going to get in as many different ideas as possible.”
This story is from the August 2019 edition of Total Film.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber ? Sign In
This story is from the August 2019 edition of Total Film.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber? Sign In
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...
Her antidote to that? Timestalker a dark not-quite-romcom set over the course of centuries. Her protagonist Agnes finds herself attracted to the same man, Alex (Dunkirk's Aneurin Barnard), in every lifetime as she's reincarnated in the 1680s, 1790s, 1980s and the 22nd century. As romantic as that may sound, there's a bit of a catch: 'He's sort of a dickhead. On the surface he's appealing, but under, he's not.'
McQueen & Country
A moment of national pride and terror comes to the screen with World War Two historical drama Blitz. Total Film speaks to writer/director Steve McQueen and his stars Saoirse Ronan and Stephen Graham about uncovering the truth and celebrating the triumph of a defining moment in modern British history.
'I WAS, AND AM STILL, SURPRISED BY EVERY OPPORTUNITY. I'VE BEEN CONTINUOUS AND FEEL AT THE TOP OF MY FORM' JEFF GOLDBLUM
Seth Brundle. Dr. Ian Malcolm. Grandmaster. Jeff Goldblum has played some titanic characters over his 50-year career, and is celebrating a half-century on our screens by going bigger than ever. First he played Zeus in Netflix show Kaos, and now he's the Wizard of Oz in Wicked. Total Film meets the man behind the curtain...
STICKY SITUATION
Seven years on from his last big-screen appearance, marmalade's biggest fan returns for Paddington in Peru. Total Film talks to director Dougal Wilson, actor Hugh Bonneville and the visual-effects wizards who make the magic happen...
BORN TO BE WILD
BROTHERS IS THE MOST SURPRISING ACTION COMEDY OF THE YEAR, AND NOT JUST BECAUSE JOSH BROLIN AND PETER DINKLAGE PLAY CRIMINAL TWINS. TOTAL FILM ROUNDS UP THE STARS TO TALK ABOUT DYSFUNCTIONAL FAMILIES, THE 'HARD AS NAILS' COMEDIES THEY GREW UP WITH, AND MASTURBATING MONKEYS...
TRIPPING THE LIGHT FANTASTIC
ALL WE IMAGINE AS LIGHT Payal Kapadia's film shows the Mumbai you've never seen...
HUMPH DAY BOGART: LIFE COMES IN FLASHES
Behind every great man is a great woman. Or in Humphrey Bogart's case, four great women...
CALLING THE SHOTS
NEVER LOOK AWAY Lucy Lawless directs a bio-doc about a trailblazing camerawoman...