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70.
Alita: Battle
AngelDirector
Robert RodriguezCast
Rosa salazar, christoph waltz, Jennifer
connelly, Mahershala AliRelease date
14 february 2019Alita: Battle Angel seemed like the
perfect fit for director Robert Rodriguez, a
longtime fan of all things anime. “I’ve been
into this stuff forever,” he tells us. “I started
as a cartoonist, so I was always buying art
and graphic novels. I’ve been tracing and
drawing since I was 12. I would always be
inspired by it.”
Whenever Rodriguez visited Japan on
business, he would return home with heaps
of manga and anime, titles that hadn’t yet
made it to the west. His passion for the
genre has been going strong ever since,
which is why he was so keen to get involved
with James Cameron’s latest film — an
adaptation of Yukito Kishiro’s manga series
Battle Angel Alita — when he was presented
with the script.
“What spoke to me first was his story;
how he created such an amazing story with
the father and the daughter characters,” says
Rodriguez. “I could see he borrowed things
from different books. He moved them around
and made a movie story out of it. I could
see what stuff he made deeper, but it was
still inspired by what was there originally.
It’s amazing to see how everybody could
look at the same thing and see something
different. Seeing what Jim sees in something
is completely different. He made the movie
Big eyes, big heart
Robert Rodriguez talks his Alita adaptation
Big eyes, big heart
inteRview adam tanswell
that he wanted to make using those story
elements in the script.”
We’re very excited to see what Rodriguez,
a filmmaker who has settled into a role as
one of the most fiercely independent yet
mainstream genre filmmakers out there,
will do with the resources provided to him
by a big studio budget and the backing of
someone like James Cameron. While the
track record of American live-action anime
and manga movies adaptations is fairly grim
(we’re still kind of annoyed about Ghost In
The Shell), the combination of Rodriguez and
Cameron should provide the level of genuine
geek culture love, visual fireworks and heart
needed to get it right.
It’s also worth noting just how great the
supporting cast is, and Rosa Salazar is
definitely on the verge of breaking out.- High Life
Released: tBA
Director: Claire Denis
Cast: Robert Pattinson, Juliette Binoche,
André Benjamin, Mia Goth
Director Claire Denis is back and she’s
giving SF a try, sending Robert Pattinson
to space. As an incarcerated criminal,
Pattinson’s Monte is told that he will be freed
if he joins a group of inmates on an energy-
finding mission to space. But things take a
turn from the worst when the prisoners start
being experimented on sexually and Monte
becomes the biological father of a daughter
birthed through artificial insemination. the
story sounds out of the ordinary, but the film
is rooted in science; French physicist and
black hole expert Aurélien Barrau works as a
scientific expert and consultant.