TAKE 20

THIS MONTH’S FILM MOMENTS THAT MATTER

[ EDITED BY JOHN NUGENT]

No. /1 Inside Star Wars’ new TV empire

Lucasfilm president KATHLEEN KENNEDY on the many galaxy-set shows not so far, far away

Illustration: Russell Moorcroft

FOR FORTY YEARS, cinematic events didn’t get more, well, cinematic than Star Wars.

But if bringing Hollywood’s greatest galaxy to the small screen in 2019 with The Mandalorian was something of a gamble, it paid off. For now, the immediate future of Star Wars belongs to Disney+.

While the next movie, Rogue Squadron, is still several years away, 2022 brings a flurry of streaming series set across different corners and eras of the galaxy far, far away. “It’s pretty exciting to see what’s going to be coming next year with Obi-Wan and Andor, Mandalorian, Ahsoka,” says Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy. “These projects are all so individual and unique in their own way that I think they’ll appeal to a wide variety of audiences within Star Wars.”

For Kennedy, it’s no surprise that Star Wars is thriving on the small screen. “In many ways, that’s the core of what inspired George [Lucas] to begin with,” she says. “This longform storytelling, and ability to create interconnected storylines, stems from that kind of Saturdaymatinée cliffhanger storytelling that George was so inspired by.”

Interconnected storylines are very much the plan for Dave Filoni and Jon Favreau’s so-called ‘Mando-verse’ — comprising a handful of upcoming series which Kennedy confirmed, in 2020’s Disney Investor Day announcement, will “culminate in a climactic story event”. The Mandalorian Season 2 spawned imminent spin-off The Book Of Boba Fett (see page 50). And next up, beyond Mando Season 3, is Ahsoka — following Rosario Dawson’s Jedi Ahsoka Tano, fresh from making her live-action debut in Mando’s ‘Chapter 13: The Jedi’, after featuring heavily in Filoni’s Clone Wars and Rebels animated series.

“It’s thrilling, I gotta tell you,” says Filoni, who is currently scripting the Ahsoka series. “It’s something you imagine doing for a long time. And then it’s kind of startling when you’re sitting there, and now you have to do it.” If he always hoped to bring the character into live action, the route there has proved unexpected. “I thought of this adventure for Ahsoka for a long time, and it’s interesting to see how it’s evolved,” he says. “Years ago, I never would have imagined that it was sprung from a branch of a tree that had anything to do with a guy [like] Din Djarin, or a child that looks like Yoda. It’s a great lesson for me on how, when you have other creatives like Jon Favreau, they can help lend such dimension and depth to what you’re doing.”

For now, fellow Mando spin-off Rangers Of The New Republic — due to centre on The Mandalorian’s Cara Dune, played by Gina Carano, who Lucasfilm later stated is “not currently employed” by them following controversial social-media posts — seems to be on hold, and likely to be absorbed into other series. “We’d never written any scripts or anything on that,” confirms Kennedy. “Some of that will figure into future episodes, I’m sure, of the next iteration of Mandalorian.”

It’s not just the ‘Mando-verse’ taking flight. Perhaps the most anticipated upcoming series is Obi-Wan Kenobi, set a decade after the events of Episode III — Revenge Of The Sith — bringing back not just Ewan McGregor as the legendary Jedi Master, but also Hayden Christensen’s Anakin/Vader. “The thing that was most exciting was being on the set and watching the two of them get excited,” says Kennedy of the duo’s reunion. “They hadn’t seen one another in a long time. I was surprised at just how incredibly emotional it was for each of them to find themselves back in these roles, and just realising how important Star Wars was to each of them. It was the beginning of their careers.”

Despite the massive slate of Star Wars shows — plus, Kennedy hints, more yet to be announced, noting that “there’s a couple of other things that are in the hopper” — big-screen Star Wars is far from finished. There’s Patty Jenkins’ galactic-fighter-pilot Star Wars: Rogue Squadron (though that’s reportedly been delayed), plus a film from Taika Waititi, and one produced by Marvel boss Kevin Feige — hardly minor prospects. There could also, potentially, be more from the Sequel Trilogy characters.

“Certainly, those are not characters we’re going to forget,” Kennedy teases. “They will live on, and those are conversations that are going on with the creative team as well.”

But it’s in serialised form that the saga is finding real room to expand its horizons. “That’s the best of all worlds,” says Kennedy, “to be able to experiment like this, and take some risks that are a little more difficult in the movie space.”

Punch it.

BEN TRAVIS

No. /2 Not even a pandemic can stop Bayhem

Michael Bay will not turn down the noise for AMBULANCE — shot during lockdown in just 38 days

Top Gear had gone a little too far this time;

MICHAEL BAY HAS spent his entire career putting people into ambulances. (Movie characters, we should stress.) So it was perhaps inevitable that he would eventually end up inside one himself. “I’m telling you, you get slammed around in there,” he laughs of the title star of his new movie. “I got fucked up several times with the camera. Literally. I went face-plant into the dash, I hit the walls… it’s pretty hard in there when you hit a corner.”

The reason Bay was crammed into the back of an ambulance haring around LA streets at speeds even regular ones would baulk at is simple. It’s all in service of Ambulance, a thriller which stars Jake Gyllenhaal and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as Danny and Will Sharp, two adoptive brothers who, immediately after a bank job that goes wrong, find themselves commandeering an emergency vehicle in a desperate attempt to escape. Except it doesn’t go according to plan — not only are they being tracked by law enforcement and the media, but it turns out a paramedic (Eiza González) is in the back. Along with a wounded cop. Who, just to twist the knife a little, was wounded during the robbery.

Chris Fedak’s script, a rewrite of a Danish thriller from 2005, had been bouncing around Hollywood for a number of years before it wound up in the hands of Bay, who was desperate to make something during lockdown. “I said to my agent, ‘I want to do something small, fast, and knock it out.’” His agent hooked him up with Ambulance — “I’m like, ‘That’s a silly title’” — and, moniker-related misgivings aside, Bay was soon hooked by the chance to make a truly relentless thriller. “I like a good heist movie.

I like something that’s intense,” he says. “And I wanted the audience to have that sense of intensity. It doesn’t let up.”

In many ways, Ambulance is Bay’s smallest movie in yonks (the shoot came in at 38 days, during which he averaged 100 set-ups a day; the last time he shot something that quickly was the more sedate Pain & Gain in 2013). But there’ll be no shortage of Bayhem, from the Heat-style shoot-out that unfolds after the heist, to the chase that unfolds thereafter. “I’m all about putting the gas on,” he laughs. “But you gotta keep a reality to it. The gas is the easy part.”

The hard part will be nailing the emotional complexity of the film’s central relationship, between the brothers, with Will, a former soldier, recruited for the heist by Gyllenhaal’s slightly murkier Danny. “There’s a lot of emotion towards the end,” says Bay. “This puts you in the place of, if you were fucked, you did something and you fucked up a crime — I’m saying ‘fuck’ a lot — you are watching people that are so fucked right now, and you think, ‘How the fuck are they going to get out of this?’ That’s a lot of ‘fucks’ in a row.” It is, but the situation warrants it. By movie’s end, we might just need more ambulances.

CHRIS HEWITT

AMBULANCE IS IN CINEMAS FROM 18 FEBRUARY