Welcome to the latest edition of The Weekend Read — Deadline’s curated collection of the long-form stories you might have missed during the week.
Read our digital cover story in which Pierce Brosnan and Helen Mirren discuss their marital madness in Guy Ritchie’s series MobLand.
Then we have our review of Ebenezer, which sees Johnny Depp’s return as the titular Scrooge character and an interview with the filmmakers behind the documentary Kikuyu Land, which explores the devastating impact of historical land theft in Kenya.
Plus, we sat down with the young breakout actress Molly McCann from The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping, and from Polish festival ToruńCamerimage, we talk ’80s pop culture and Easter Island with the cinematographers behind Project Hail Mary and Wild Horse Nine.
Click on the links below to find out more.
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Cover Story: Pierce Brosnan & Helen Mirren Talk ‘MobLand’ Marriage
Image Credit: Deadline As her MobLand character Maeve Harrigan, she’s already (probably) been dropping antifreeze in her beloved hubby Conrad’s tea and, so far in the show, we’ve seen best friends bumped off, the couple’s eldest son chain-sawed to death and, in the Season 2 premiere, a full-on massacre at the dog track. This couple are, shall we say, complicated.
Now, Mirren swoops in with her (actually fake) knife and rather un-murderously uses it to cut the (also fake) Sunday roast on the table. She and Brosnan are so in sync, such a perfectly dead-pan double act, that everyone in the room breaks into laughter. After all, it’s something special to be in the presence of acting royalty — Dame Mirren, who, among many epic roles, played Queen Elizabeth II in The Crown, and Pierce Brosnan, the actual former 007.
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The ‘Ebenezer’ Review
Image Credit: Paramount Pictures There have been countless iterations on the Charles Dickens yuletide classic, “A Christmas Carol” which was first birthed to the world as a novella in 1843, but has been a favorite of Hollywood for nearly a century. Actors have warmed to the bah humbug of it all in various takes beginning with Reginald Owen in 1938’s A Christmas Carol to perhaps still the best, Alastair Sim in the 1951 version. George C. Scott and Patrick Stewart did well-regarded TV movies. Bill Murray did a contemporary comedic version with Scrooged. Albert Finney turned it all into a big screen musical in 1970. Even Kermit and Miss Piggy jumped on board with The Muppet Christmas Carol, and no less than Mr. Magoo in the evergreen (and personal favorite) Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol. In 2017 Christopher Plummer even took a whirl with Scrooge in the clever and wonderful biopic, The Man Who Invented Christmas which was all about Dickens writing the time honored tale.
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Kenyan Land Theft In ‘Kikuyu Land’
Image Credit: Courtesy Trifilm Studios/The Bea Company The legacy of colonialism comes at a tremendous cost to protagonists of the award-winning documentary Kikuyu Land.
Take Mr. Mungai, for instance, whose family owned land in Kenya’s tea highlands that was seized by the British when they ruled the country. The land’s value today: in the billions of dollars. The film, which screened Tuesday evening as part of Deadline’s For the Love of Docs virtual event series, follows Mr. Mungai as he pursues a legal battle to get back the magnificent acreage, now controlled by multinational corporations.
“I met Mr. Mungai through [Joseph] NJenga… our other producer,” Bea Wangondu, who directed Kikuyu Land with Andrew H. Brown, explained during a discussion after the screening. “And the introduction was, ‘Come and meet this man who’s got all this paperwork, evidence [of land theft] that he’s collected over eight years,’ and we just clicked. He’s an amazing human being. He’s now a dad to me… We are very close.”
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‘The Hunger Games: Sunrise On The Reaping’ Breakout Molly McCann
Image Credit: Lia Toby/Getty Images for Lionsgate UK Molly McCann has a lot to be excited about. The 15-year-old Irish actress has already built up a roster of credits including Bad Sisters and 2020 Sundance hit title Herself, but now she’s gearing up for her biggest project to date with The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping, Lionsgate’s latest return to Suzanne Collins’ hugely popular dystopian universe.
McCann plays Louella McCoy, one of the female tributes from District 12 and a close ally of Haymitch, in a story set some 24 years before Katniss Everdeen’s story, the character famously played by Jennifer Lawrence more than a decade ago.
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‘Project Hail Mary’s Cinematographer Greig Fraser On ’80s Pop Culture Influences
Image Credit: Amazon MGM Oscar-winning cinematographer Greig Fraser took time out of shooting Sam Mendes’ The Beatles films to reflect on how he and directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller crafted the visuals for summer box office hit Project Hail Mary.
Fraser spoke to Deadline during the ToruńCamerimage Film Festival and said that working with Lord and Miller had been a long time in the making.
“I’ve known Phil and Christopher for a while in passing but we hadn’t worked together yet until this film,” he said. “What I love about them is that there is definitely a thread that runs through their films but genre-wise, they are completely different in everything they do. They are like these savants that just keep flicking between different formats and ratios and stories but there is an underlying theme in their work. What I think is beautiful about their work is that we all grew up on the same films and he same cartoons and we are all influenced by the same series of things.”
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How ‘Wild Horse Nine’ Cinematographer Ben Davis Captured Easter Island
Image Credit: Searchlight Pictures / Everett Collection British cinematographer Ben Davis has just wrapped shooting Bradley Cooper’s Ocean’s Eleven prequel when he touches down at the ToruńCamerimage Film Festival in Poland to discuss Wild Horse Nine, his latest film with writer-director Martin McDonagh.
The film, which is the fourth collaboration between Davis and McDonagh, stars Sam Rockwell and John Malkovich and is shot on the remote shores of Easter Island, some 2,330 miles west of mainland Chile.
“I’d been to Easter Island before in 1999 to shoot a one or two-minute piece about the millennium that we shot there for some reason,” Davis tells Deadline. “So, I kind of knew the place. It’s an extraordinary place. It’s very odd, but very beautiful. There aren’t words really to describe it. It’s quite spiritual and it’s sort of this deforested island with these [Moai] heads just looking out to the ocean. You’re surrounded by an endless horizon in every direction, but it has this idea that you have immense space and isolation, which is obviously what attracted Martin to it as he likes to isolate his characters.”
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