Michelle Rodriguez Starring In Tomboy, A Revenger's Tale

Sigourney Weaver will be a knife-happy surgeon

Walter Hill is tackling transgender themes in his next film, albeit in the guise of an action thriller. Michelle Rodriguez and Sigourney Weaver are on board to star in Tomboy, A Revenger’s Tale. 

Hill has written the script based on a story by Denis Hamill, which sees a top assassin double-crossed by gangsters and handed over to a rogue surgeon (Weaver) who turns him into a woman. Now a hit woman, she heads out for some vengeance, aided by a nursed named Johnnie who also has secrets. 

It’ll be an interesting role for Rodriguez to tackle and a welcome leading performance give how often she’s been in ensembles recently. She’s taking over the job from Freida Pinto, who was attached a couple of months ago before the film made its initial rounds at the Toronto Film Festival’s market. Hill will start rolling the cameras next month in Vancouver.

Rodriguez, most recently back as Letty for Fast & Furious 7, is filming family drama Milton’s Secret. Weaver was part of the cast for Chappie and will be seen in A Monster Calls and Paul Feig’s Ghostbusters, in which she has a cameo. The latter will be in UK cinemas on July 15. 

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Rihanna Joins Luc Besson's Valerian

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Exclusive: First Look At Will Smith’s Suicide Squad Cover

Deadshot comes alive

Deadshot is the new American Sniper. Kinda. Will Smith’s troubled assassin is a marksman whose deadly aim is put into the service of Suicide Squad in David Ayer’s new comic-book movie, but a jutting-jawed patriot this guy emphatically isn’t. Here, on Empire’s fourth and final newsstand cover, is the man himself in full combat regalia and boasting enough ammo to fill even John Woo’s bullet drawer.

“On Bad Boys I trained in Miami with special-ops guys, but this is a whole other level,” laughs Smith of the training process. He hints at a complex dynamic with Quinn and the Joker along the way. “Deadpool’s actually eyeballing [Harley] a little bit. There’s a pretty ragged romantic triangle there.”

Deadshot, AKA Floyd Lawton, is Suicide Squad's walking arsenal. He brings the firepower to a crew that also includes Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie), Killer Croc (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), Slipknot (Adam Beach), Katana (Karen Fukuhara), Diablo (Jay Hernandez) and Captain Boomerang (Jai Courtney). Playing the Lee Marvin role to this dirty half-dozen-and-a-bit – albeit a rank above – is Colonel Rick Flag. “Deadshot gives him the most problems,” rues the man trying to give the orders, Joel Kinnaman.

For much, much more on Suicide Squad, pick up the new issue of Empire. It's available from your friendly local newsagent, and the odd unusually well-stocked secret government facility, from Thursday, October 29.

 

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Exclusive: Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn Makes Her Bow

Here comes Suicide Squad’s mischief-maker

If you thought the Watchmen were messed up, get a load of Suicide Squad. Leading off Empire's rogues gallery of new covers was Jared Leto’s wild card, not a member of the squad but still the beating heartlessness at the core of David Ayer’s comic-book adaptation, and Cara Delevingne’s Enchantress. Now comes Margot Robbie's post-transformation Harley Quinn, the third newsstand star to adorn the new Suicide Squad issue.

A mischief-making case-study in how not to conduct therapy sessions, not only will she not improve the Joker’s mental equilibrium, her own psychological health will be sent spinning along the way. Along with her work attire. “When I got the role I started looking up Harley costumes online, with my mum sitting next to me,” Robbie tells Empire. “She was like, ‘My daughter is going to dress like a prostitute!' There are a lot of angry mothers out there!”

With apologies to Mrs Robbie, this image of a fully decked-out Quinn might cause a splutter or two back in Queensland. Like a heavily-armed riot grrl, she accessorises punk and street gang style with a non-MLB approved baseball bat and a sidearm the size of Liechtenstein. Note, too, the ‘Daddy’s Little Monster’ tee.

A property Ayer has termed “Comic-Book Movie 2.0”, Suicide Squad is not your common-or-garden superhero tear-up. This one, Ayer is at pains to explain in Empire’s on-set report, is something different. “You do a story about struggle and isolation and people who have been shit on, that suddenly get thrown this lifeline... that’s not so bad.” On the surface, at least, it seems like Robbie’s character is heading in the other direction, but she has demons that need exorcising too. Unfortunately, it’s the Joker doing the exorcising.

For a whole mess more on Suicide Squad, including unprecedented insights into what make these characters tick (literally, bearing in mind the nanobombs implanted into each of the squad), pick up one of these covers from your friendly local newsagent from Thursday, October 29.

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Rooney Mara And Nicholas Hoult Fall For The Discovery

They're starring in the sci-fi romance

If you were the person who discovered that the afterlife is, after all, real, and could be scientifically proven, what would you do? Find religion? Become depressed? Or use the knowledge to convince someone to fall in love with you? Because that’s what Nicholas Hoult might be doing with Rooney Mara in the new sci-fi drama The Discovery.

Admittedly, that’s probably not his big plan, but he is a scientist who finds out that heaven – or some version of it – might be really real, and he will meet and fall for Mara, a woman whose past is tinged with tragedy. Bet his big discovery ties into that somehow. And sorry Kristen Stewart – if you thought you had the monopoly on sci-fi love stories co-starring Nicholas Hoult after Equals, you need to think again. 

Charlie McDowell is directing this one, working with his The One I Love co-writer Justin Lader to once more produce the script. He’ll have the cameras rolling this January in Rhode Island.

Hoult has worked on Equals, which we mentioned above, and will be seen in Kill Your Friends hitting next week. He’s also back with his mutant colleagues in X-Men: Apocalypse, out on May 19 next year. Mara is on screens now in Pan and stars with Cate Blanchett in the acclaimed Carol, which is out on November 27. 

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Exclusive New Look At Leonardo DiCaprio In The Revenant

The musketball diaries

If Hollywood scuttlebutt is to believed, The Revenant’s wintry shoot was an anguished time littered with the souls of the damned, where the crew members looked like Jack Torrance at the end of The Shining and even the on-set snowmen were chain-smoking. “Hellish” is a word that’s often associated with those snowbound months. But as Apocalypse Now and Fitzcarraldo prove, from even the most arduous and remote shoots can come majestic movies. Judging by all we’ve seen so far – including this beautiful, widescreen new still from the film - Alejandro González Iñárritu’s survival epic has every chance of joining them in the canon of greats.

Making great art can require big sacrifices, and as Empire discovers in the new issue, Iñárritu demanded plenty of his cast and crew along the way. “It was an extremely challenging shoot,” he tells us in the warmer climes of his Santa Monica offices. The conditions were hardly conducive to swift filmmaking. “People get sick, or the cameras shut down because of the cold, or you get so frozen you cannot move your fucking feet,” he remembers. "Everything takes triple time.”

Also suffering for his art was Leonardo DiCaprio as a wounded, abandoned fur trapped called Hugh Glass. Left to die by his fellows (Tom Hardy and Will Poulter), Glass must deal with his wounds, some peckish wildlife and a hostile wilderness peopled by hostile Native Americans of the kind orchestrating the assault pictured above.

In Empire’s new issue - onsale tomorrow - we celebrate the audacity of the Mexican director’s vision. To shoot with only available light and brave temperatures that dropped to -40 takes the kind of chutzpah you’d only find in the kind of man who’d send Michael Keaton into Times Square in his underpants. Luckily, Iñárritu is that man.

You’ll be able to see the end result when The Revenant lands in UK cinemas on January 15. Bring a beanie.

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M. Night Shyamalan To Tackle Split With James McAvoy

Release date pegged for January 2017

Recently enjoying his best reviews for years with his low-budget horror The Visit, M. Night Shyamalan is sticking with producer Jason Blum for his next movie. Until recently going by the unwieldy moniker Untitled Blumhouse Production, the project now has a title. It's called Split.

As previously reported as an aside in a story about The Keeping Hours, Split will star James McAvoy. We now learn that the once and future Professor X will be joined by Anya Taylor Joy, Betty Buckley, Jessica Sula and Haley Lu Richardson. Nothing's yet being revealed about the plot, although we're told it's " a suspense thriller with elements of the supernatural".

Behind the scenes, Shyamalan will be reteaming with several The Visit alumni, including Marc Bienstock and executive producers Ashwin Rajan and Steven Schneider. All will be hoping to repeat The Visit's box office success: $90m worldwide from a budget of just $5m.

And with the title comes a release date. Split will arrive - in the US at least - on January 20, 2017.

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M. Night Shyamalan's To Tackle Split With James McAvoy

Release date pegged for January 2017

Recently enjoying his best reviews for years with his low-budget horror The Visit, M. Night Shyamalan is sticking with producer Jason Blum for his next movie. Until recently going by the unwieldy moniker Untitled Blumhouse Production, the project now has a title. It's called Split.

As previously reported as an aside in a story about The Keeping Hours, Split will star James McAvoy. We now learn that the once and future Professor X will be joined by Anya Taylor Joy, Betty Buckley, Jessica Sula and Haley Lu Richardson. Nothing's yet being revealed about the plot, although we're told it's " a suspense thriller with elements of the supernatural".

Behind the scenes, Shyamalan will be reteaming with several The Visit alumni, including Marc Bienstock and executive producers Ashwin Rajan and Steven Schneider. All will be hoping to repeat The Visit's box office success: $90m worldwide from a budget of just $5m.

And with the title comes a release date. Split will arrive - in the US at least - on January 20, 2017.

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First Trailer For Don Verdean Unearthed

Sam Rockwell and Danny McBride on a mission for God

With his Masterminds currently in release limbo due to the bankruptcy at Relativity, the next film we'll see from Napoleaon Dynamite director Jared Hess will be Don Verdean. Sam Rockwell, Danny McBride, Amy Ryan, Jemaine Clement and Will Forte star, and the first trailer has just arrived.

As you'll have gathered from that, the film sees Rockwell's Biblical archaeologist Don and his sidekick Boaz (Clement) hired by McBride to find the skull of Goliath in Israel. But when Don comes up short, his failure fuels a farcical conspiracy. Sometimes "untruths are necessary for the greater good".

Don Verdean premiered at Sundance at the start of this year, and gets a lmited US theatrical release and an online rollout courtesy of Lionsgate on December 11. There's no UK release date so far.

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Alice Lowe Prepares For Prevenge

Directing and starring in 'post-feminist killing spree'

Most recently seen in the Inside No. 9 episode Seance Time, Alice Lowe will next be making her feature-length debut as a director. She's also written and will star in Prevenge, a "post-feminist revenge movie" set to shoot imminently in Cardiff and London.

Not much has yet been revealed about the story, other than that it revolves around a pregnant woman on a killing spree, "targeting individuals from different walks of life". Her motivation only becomes clear as the movie progresses.

Herself currently seven-and-a-half months pregnant, Lowe says the film was inspired by “my real experience. People automatically assume you’re a lovely person because you’re pregnant... I wanted to write something which defied that image of the pregnant woman as this safe, sweet, kind person… I felt like motherhood is a crazy, interesting experience and it’s rarely seen on screen. Pregnancy could be a very alien, existential experience and we don’t show it on screen in those terms. I wanted to defy people’s expectations of what that character was and could be, and get some humour out of it.”

Perhaps taking a leaf out of her Sightseers director Ben Wheatley's directing playbook, Lowe says that while the screenplay is pretty straightforward, there'll be plenty of improvisation on set to shake things up. "It’s going to be quite bloody and it’s probably slightly more serious than Sightseers," she explains. "It operates in more of a real realm and the humour comes from the reality of the situation.”

Kate Dickie and Lowe's Sightseers co-star Eileen Davies, are among the rest of the cast confirmed so far. Ryan Owen Eddleston (American Interior) is the cinematographer, and Jennifer Handorf (Borderlands), Vaughan Sivell (Third Star) and Jamie Adams (Black Mountain Poets, which Lowe was in) are the producers.

Shooting on Prevenge starts tomorrow in Wales, before moving to London for a few days in early November.

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M. Night Shyamalan's Next Film Will Be Split

Release date pegged for January 2017

Recently enjoying his best reviews for years with his low-budget horror The Visit, M. Night Shyamalan is sticking with producer Jason Blum for his next movie. Until recently going by the unwieldy moniker Untitled Blumhouse Production, the project now has a title. It's called Split.

As previously reported as an aside in a story about The Keeping Hours, Split will star James McAvoy. We now learn that the once and future Professor X will be joined by Anya Taylor Joy, Betty Buckley, Jessica Sula and Haley Lu Richardson. Nothing's yet being revealed about the plot, although we're told it's " a suspense thriller with elements of the supernatural".

Behind the scenes, Shyamalan will be reteaming with several The Visit alumni, including Marc Bienstock and executive producers Ashwin Rajan and Steven Schneider. All will be hoping to repeat The Visit's box office success: $90m worldwide from a budget of just $5m.

And with the title comes a release date. Split will arrive - in the US at least - on January 20, 2017.

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