Source: The List
Date: 17 May 2013
Written by: James Mottram

Neil Jordan’s Interview with the Vampire arguably kickstarted the current trend for bloodsuckers. James Mottram speaks to him about returning to the genre for his new flick Byzantium.

‘There have been too many vampire films lately,’ laughs Neil Jordan, perched on a chair in London’s Soho Hotel. You might say the director of Interview With the Vampire only has himself to blame. Without his 1994 take on Anne Rice’s novel, starring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt, there’d arguably be no Twilight. And while that series is now thankfully at an end, with a sixth season of True Blood and Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive on the way, our thirst for these blood-sucking characters seems unquenched.

Returning to the genre with his new film Byzantium, this vampire renaissance has left him incredulous. ‘The extraordinary thing is [it now] appeals to young teenage girls,’ says the 63 year old Irishman. If Rice’s vampires symbolised the spread of AIDS, the creature of the night has become something altogether more ‘strange’, he estimates. ‘[When I saw the first Twilight] I thought “OK, well now it’s become this allegory about chaste love between teenagers. How weird!”’

By comparison, Byzantium is neither bloodless nor sexless; Gemma Arterton plays prostitute Clara and Saoirse Ronan her daughter Eleanor (initially posing as her sister); both, as it turns out, are blood-suckers simply trying to survive. ‘It’s a girl power movie without it being about “girl power”,’ says Arterton, who clarifies by calling Clara a feminist. ‘She’s a fearless mother and very protective of her daughter. They’re not traditional vampires. They’re feminine vampires.’

With not a fang in sight – they use razor-sharp thumbnails to draw blood – the characters are dubbed ‘soucouyant’ rather than vampires. ‘I looked up the word on Wikipedia, as everyone does, and it’s a Caribbean version of a vampire,’ says Jordan. ‘If you can imagine living in a small shack and someone creeps out at night and comes back in the morning re-invigorated and you find dead cows and dead people around… every culture has its myths around the undead.’

Not that Byzantium is set on the sunny island of St. Lucia; rather it draws a lot of its atmosphere from its shabby English coastal town setting (with Hastings serving as the location). Arterton calls it right when she dubs the film ‘an arthouse horror movie’; and there’s much to admire here visually – like the sight of her sitting in the window of the Byzantium boarding house where she and Ronan hole up, bathed in neon light. ‘There are these beautiful shots that I will be eternally grateful that Neil had the idea to shoot me in,’ she says.

To prepare, Arterton – who previously worked with screenwriter Moira Buffini (here adapting her play A Vampire Story) on the breezy romcom Tamara Drewe – re-watched Interview With The Vampire. Does she see Byzantium as a companion piece of sorts? ‘It is sort of a continuation, I would say. It’s like the female version, these two girls that live as vampires.’

The way Jordan sees it, it stems not just from his Rice adaptation but his love of fantasy – including his take on Angela Carter’s The Company of Wolves and his little-seen 1991 film The Miracle about two adolescents spinning wild stories. ‘It probably comes from my father telling me ghost stories when I was a kid. It comes from a certain impatience with reality, I suppose. I wouldn’t be a great social realist.’ Maybe not, but he sure knows how to start a trend.

Byzantium is on general release from Fri 31 May.

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Jonathan welcomes former Bond girl Gemma Arterton, the hugely popular comedian Lee Evans and actors Philip Glenister, Marc Warren and Max Beesley, who discuss the new third series of their hit drama Mad Dogs. Alternative rock legends Primal Scream also perform live.

Date: Sat 18th May 2013
Time: 9:45pm
Channel: ITV
Length: 60 minutes

Movies & Television > Byzantium (2013) > Promotional Images
Movies & Television > Byzantium (2013) > Production Stills

After his successful sojourn in television with The Borgias, Neil Jordan explains how he was drawn back to film by Byzantium, a contemporary vampire story that revisits some of the director’s characteristic themes and breathes new life into an overexposed genre.

GALLERY LINK:
- Byzantium (2013) > Related Clippings > Sight & Sound (UK) – June 2013

GALLERY LINK:
- Byzantium (2013) > Trailer #2

Thanks to Chuckie.

GALLERY LINKS:
- Scans from 2013 > Observer: The New Review (UK) – May 12, 2013
- Scans from 2013 > Clippings – Daily Express (UK) – May 6, 2013

The English actress on going clubbing with her mum, her new role in a ‘neo-feminist vampire movie’ and why she has no regrets about playing Bond girl Strawberry Fields

By Tim Lewis

The first time we see Gemma Arterton in her new film, Byzantium, she is biting off the nose of a lecherous punter in a lap-dancing club. Soon after, dressed in a stripper’s outfit and running shoes, she shows a good turn of speed for a 200-year-old soucouyant and then garottes another man with cheese wire. Byzantium is a vampire film, but we already know it’s altogether darker, sexier and more gleeful than some recent incarnations of the genre. At the heart of the action are Clara (Arterton) and her daughter, Eleanor (Saoirse Ronan), and their battle against an all-male cabal that wants to hunt them down.

The 27-year-old Arterton has always been drawn to the weird and eclectic – the film that made her want to become an actress was Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark – but that has not stopped the girl from Gravesend being wooed by Hollywood. Popcorn-friendly roles in Clash of the Titans and Prince of Persia have been interspersed with smart, subversive turns in The Disappearance of Alice Creed and Tamara Drewe. On the phone from Berlin, we spoke about big and little films, clubbing in your 50s and the secret of a perfect lemon meringue pie.

What are you doing in Berlin?
I’m shooting a film called The Voices directed by Marjane Satrapi, who is brilliant. She’s a graphic novelist who did a book and film called Persepolis. I’ve never had such a good feeling with a director – she’s incredible and I’m really happy because I know we’re making good stuff.

I’ve heard a little about The Voices; it sounds quite an odd premise. Something about an evil pet cat and a good pet dog…
It’s about a guy who has schizophrenia and we see the world from his point of view. It’s hyper-real, hyper-colourful. His cat and dog talk to him, which he thinks is completely normal, and he works in a toilet factory, which he thinks is the best place in the world. There are various women he works with in the factory and he ends up accidentally killing one of them, which is me, and then he chops my body up and puts it in the fridge. My head is talking to him while it’s in the fridge. But sometimes the camera pans off out of his vision and into the reality of his life, which is horrifying. It’s like Psycho meets Fargo and it’s one of the best scripts I’ve ever read.

Byzantium has been called a “neo-feminist vampire movie” – is that how you see it?
Yeah, I guess so. Moira Buffini, the writer, is a real feminist and that’s how she proposed it to me. There’s this massive contradiction in the film in that my character, Clara, is a woman who sells her body and also ends up killing people she doesn’t think are worthy of this world, such as pimps and rapists. So she uses her sexuality to do that.

Moira used this line and I loved it: she said: “It’s more fuck you than fuck me.” But it’s more complicated than that, because it’s about what it is to be a single parent, and how hard that is and how brilliant you have to be as a person to get through it for 200 years.

Your mother brought up you and your sister mostly on her own. Was she an inspiration for Clara?
There are similarities. Both Clara and my mother are parents who seem younger than their daughters in many senses. Our house was like a softer version of Absolutely Fabulous at times – this complicated mother-daughter relationship in which sometimes the daughter is the mother.

At what age did you realise that your role was to be the more grown-up one?
Um, when I was about three or four. I think it’s part of my personality – I’m quite maternal. My mum and I are both very practical; we are real doers and we are both very creative, and any artistic ability I might have comes from her. She always had music and art in the house and was always painting and visiting places. But in terms of our personalities, we’re quite different.

Is it true that she has started clubbing again in her 50s?
She’s been clubbing for the past 20 years. That’s what she does.

Are you at home waiting for her, looking at your watch?
No, I go clubbing with her sometimes. Whenever I tell people that she does that they are so shocked, but loads of people in their 50s go clubbing. It’s not that odd.

In Byzantium, Clara goes into this male-dominated realm and sets about restoring some balance. Is that a metaphor for your experience of working in the film industry?
The film world’s not as harsh as that! There’s definitely inequality, it’s very prevalent, but in Byzantium she’s flat-out rejected, so she has this vengeance. I don’t want to sound scathing of the industry but I see things all the time that are not great for women when it comes to equality. But it is changing; I don’t think it’s as boys’ clubby as it was.

What can you do about it?
This year, I’m only working with female directors, coincidentally; Marjane is the first. And I’m starting my own production company so that I can be a little more instrumental in the whole process. You need to take it into your own hands and create parts for women, and for female writers and directors. Otherwise, the process can be quite frustrating.

Is it still the case that it’s hard to get financing for a project if, like Byzantium, the leads are women?
Yes, it’s true. Very much so, unless you get someone properly famous in the lead role. We are talking very, very famous.

How many women are there like that: one, two, a dozen?
If you got someone like Natalie Portman to play Clara, then it probably would have got financing immediately. But because they were going for people who weren’t as well-established – and probably cheaper as well, let’s be honest – it’s harder. Originally, we had somebody quite well-known playing the Darvell part in Byzantium, which Sam Riley plays, and he dropped out at the last minute and all the funding just went down the drain. And he’s not even in the film that much. So it just goes to show that backers like to know that they have got a famous male lead in there.

Much of Clara’s clothing comes from Soho sex shops. Were you involved in picking the outfits?
Yeah, we wanted the clothing that she wore to be part of her kit, part of her killing kit, so everything was very conscious. The costume designer, Consolata Boyle, is very put together and sensible and it was fun going to these shops with her and her looking at the fabric quality and the seams. These clothes were so disgusting, but she’d go: “Ooh, it’s very beautiful, this colour.”

It looks like you worked out a lot for the role. Would you have reacted differently if you had been asked to lose weight rather than tone up?
Definitely. I wanted to make it believable that Clara could kill somebody and overwhelm someone. So many times, I see films where the woman is too feeble and I don’t believe it. I wanted her to be dangerous and lethal. There’s nothing worse than when you see a woman killing a guy and you think, yeah, you’d probably snap if they pushed you over.

You’ve always mixed Hollywood blockbusters with smaller independent films. Is it hard to turn down the big money when you’re offered it?
I actually made a decision at Christmas only to do stuff that I really care about. When I started, I always tried to do theatre, so I never thought about the career of a film actress, what that entailed. Because in the theatre, you’re so free to do whatever you want, there are no repercussions. When you do film, you have to be a bit more careful because the stuff is around for ever and you can watch it two years later on a plane and think, oh for fuck’s sake, it’s still going around, that film…

So you have to learn to say no?
At first, I was grateful to be considered for anything, but you have to get over that and be a bit more responsible. At the moment, I’m thinking, what is it I really want to say? Who do I want to work with? It means shutting out a lot of stuff, which is scary because then you might be broke or you might not get work for ages. But you feel better in your heart. So I think that’s what I’m going through at the moment, which is quite cool because I get to make a film like The Voices. It just makes me feel better in my heart – it’s wanky that, but it’s fundamental too.

Are you still pleased you did the Bond film Quantum of Solace?
Yeah, I don’t have any shame in that one. That was really a good experience for me. Sometimes, me and my agent have chats and I go: “God, I wish I hadn’t done so-and-so film” and she says: “Don’t say that because it’s all part and parcel of where you are now.” It’s true I can’t really say that because, who knows, maybe I wouldn’t have been able to do Byzantium without that profile kick.

Whose career do you admire or aspire to?
I don’t aspire to anyone’s career, although there are actors who I think are good. I think Emily Watson is wonderful, and someone like Rachel Weisz has done a thing that I’d like to do, playing around with genres and theatre. Everyone always talks about film, but theatre’s equally important to me.

I’ve heard you are a serious cook. What’s your signature dish?
I’m quite well-known for my lemon meringue pie. I make it from scratch: you have to make your own lemon curd and you have to make your own pastry. The pastry has got to be a good bake because the lemon curd is heavy and soft and wet. Then of course there’s the meringue on top, which is notoriously tricky. I make it quite tart and lemony, and if you get it right, yum.

British actress Gemma Arterton has told ‘The Observer’ newspaper that she loved tracking down her character’s wardrobe for Neil Jordan’s new film ‘Byzantium‘ in Soho sex shops.

“We wanted the clothing that she wore to be part of her kit, part of her killing kit, so everything was very conscious. The costume designer, Consolata Boyle, is very put together and sensible and it was fun going to these shops with her and her looking at the fabric quality and the seams. These clothes were so disgusting, but she’d go: “Ooh, it’s very beautiful, this colour.”

In the film, Arterton, 27, plays a 200-year-old vampire who tries to protect her daughter (Saoirse Ronan) from the all-male cabal that wants to hunt them down.

She describes the film as a “neo-feminist vampire movie”. “Moira Buffini, the writer, is a real feminist and that’s how she proposed it to me. There’s this massive contradiction in the film in that my character, Clara, is a woman who sells her body and also ends up killing people she doesn’t think are worthy of this world, such as pimps and rapists. So she uses her sexuality to do that.

“Moira used this line and I loved it: she said: ‘It’s more f*** you than f*** me.’ But it’s more complicated than that, because it’s about what it is to be a single parent, and how hard that is and how brilliant you have to be as a person to get through it for 200 years.”

She worked out a lot for the role. “I wanted to make it believable that Clara could kill somebody and overwhelm someone. So many times, I see films where the woman is too feeble and I don’t believe it. I wanted her to be dangerous and lethal. There’s nothing worse than when you see a woman killing a guy and you think, yeah, you’d probably snap if they pushed you over.”

Arterton was brought up by a single mother herself. “Both Clara and my mother are parents who seem younger than their daughters in many senses. Our house was like a softer version of ‘Absolutely Fabulous‘ at times – this complicated mother-daughter relationship in which sometimes the daughter is the mother.”

Arterton says she is only working with female directors this year and is starting her own production company “so that I can be a little more instrumental in the whole process. You need to take it into your own hands and create parts for women, and for female writers and directors. Otherwise, the process can be quite frustrating.”

She is currently shooting ‘The Voices‘ in Berlin, directed by graphic novelist Marjane Satrapi (‘Persepolis‘), which she describes as like “‘Psycho‘ meets ‘Fargo.’ I’ve never had such a good feeling with a director – she’s incredible and I’m really happy because I know we’re making good stuff.”

Byzantium is released on 31 May.

It’s hard not to imagine the voluptuous Gemma Arterton being typecast in Britain, a country where actresses tend to be petite British roses.

Generalisations aside though, Arterton, who was briefly a Bond girl – the blink-or-you’ll-miss-her Strawberry Fields in Quantum of Solace – is still a natural working class lass who strives to remain true to her roots and not get carried away by the fuss her very presence creates.

Her new role in the comedy drama Song for Marion suits her agenda perfectly, and even if her choir mistress in the film seems just a little too sweet, she’s not too far from the incredibly-good-natured Arterton I meet today.

Not many British actresses have such range. “There are some who do, Kate Winslet for example,” Arterton counters, attempting to downplay any claim to being fabulous, “and yes, in Song for Marion I’m geeky, not sexual at all. I do also get these bombshell type roles that are fun to play, but I am trying to mix it up a bit.”

In the film, terminally ill Marion gains courage by continuing to sing in a local seniors’ choir, with Arterton’s Elizabeth eventually convincing Stamp’s crotchety Arthur to take her place.

Arterton loved working with Redgrave and Stamp. “I’ve acted alongside some legendary actors, such as Judi Dench, and the great thing about them is they’re so normal. These days so many films are about young people when we’ve got all these amazing actors who don’t get to show how good they are.”

Stamp was impressed with his co-star. “When we were working on the movie Gemma turned down a huge lead role and I said, ‘Why?’ ‘It’s rubbish, not good for my career!’ she replied. And I thought how wonderful is that. She is all of 23 or something, [Arterton is 27]. It was thrilling to work with those two women, I can tell you. It was like two different rare materials. I think it was the most challenging job I’ve ever done in movies,” admits Arterton. “It helped that I sang in choirs in my childhood and teens, and for the movie I had to learn to play the piano in a month and conducting proved a challenge too.

Although Richard Scott was in charge of the choir, I felt a huge responsibility as they were mostly non-actors from the Newcastle area and I wanted them to sound good.”

Song for Marion is set in London, not far from the housing estate in Gravesend, Kent, where Arterton was raised after her mother divorced her father when she was five.

Her mother, a keen music lover who worked as a cleaner, encouraged her academically gifted daughter to sing and perform. At 16 Arterton left school to attend Miskin Theatre School in Dartford and later received a scholarship to study at the top British acting school, The Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts (RADA) graduating in 2007. Perhaps she could be seen as a female Billy Elliot, a working class prodigy? “I don’t know about a prodigy but I was very lucky. Not so much now but when I was a student we had a lot of support in the arts in the UK, especially if you came from a working class background.”

Even if Arterton is currently one of Britain’s most famous stars she is still acutely aware of the working class stigma. “I haven’t completely gotten over it,” she admits. “When I was training I definitely had that hang-up, but now being from a regional place as an actor is a good thing. At RADA one of the teachers told me, ‘don’t lose that because it’s the most attractive thing’. I met Andrea Arnold and she’s from the same town as me and she only works with people who are untrained. There’s now a pre-conception that trained actors are stiff and not in contact with the real world. In the end you just have to take people’s judgments with a pinch of salt. I was very lucky because I had the right people around me and the right parts came up.”

Seemingly overnight Arterton splashed on to the film scene in St Trinians (2007) and Quantum of Solace (2008) and was hailed as the next big thing. Stephen Frears cast her in the sexy feisty title role in the romantic comedy Tamara Drewe (2010) though she took a step back with the 2010 flop Prince of Persia, which she thought had destroyed her career. She recently toured the world promoting Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters, together with a less enthusiastic Jeremy Renner and though she defends that disappointing blockbuster her focus now is on quality movies. In June she is alongside Saoirse Ronan in Neil Jordan’s fantasy thriller, Byzantium, and she stars with Ben Affleck and Justin Timberlake in the crime thriller Runner, which releases later this year.

“I like taking risks but that doesn’t always mean success,” she says. “I’ve learned what I like and what I don’t like and my opinions have grown stronger, which I think is good. You have to be so opinionated in this industry.”

• Song for Marion is in cinemas now.

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GALLERY LINK:
- Song for Marion (2012) > Related Clippings > Premiere (France) – May 2013

GALLERY LINKS:
- Song for Marion (2012) > On Set
- Song for Marion (2012) > Production Stills
- Song for Marion (2012) > Posters

Tu Style still gets it wrong. Stefano Catelli isn’t an Italian stuntman Gemma met on the set of Quantum of Solace.

If reposting our scans, please don’t remove our tag, give some us credit and a link back. We spend a lot of money from our own pockect to always bring you exclusive Gemma scans whenever we can. Tu Style is a Gemma-Arterton.net exclusive goodie.

GALLERY LINK:
- Scans from 2013 > Tu Style (Italy) – May 7, 2013

Credit goes out to Mat Cyruss.

GALLERY LINK:
- Scans from 2013 > The Hunger #4 (UK)

Song for Marion is about to premiere in France (alert to French fans: it’ll be released nationwide on May 15th) and French magazine Grazia interviewed Gemma Arterton on behalf of this occasion.

Gemma’s character in Song for Marion, Elizabeth, is a woman without friends, without a boyfriend and without sex-appeal. So Grazia had the idea of making an interview about the ‘withouts’ in Gemma’s life.

The session itself was first published by Glamour USA back in 2010 and it can be found over here.

If reposting our scans, please don’t remove our tag, give some us credit and a link back. We spend a lot of money from our own pockect to always bring you exclusive Gemma scans whenever we can and we’re lucky to have regular contributors who do the same for us. Grazia France is a Gemma-Arterton.net exclusive goodie.

We thank Ludovic copiously.

GALLERY LINK:
- Scans from 2013 > Grazia (France) – May 3-9, 2013

With a bit of luck this will buck the current trend of films featuring vampires who look like catwalk models and shimmer in the sunshine. Neil Jordan has a varied and impressive filmography including one of the best modern vampire films in the form of Interview with A Vampire from 1994.

Byzantium is on general release from 31st May.

(source)

Photoshoots > Hunger TV (2013)

Gemma looks divine and the interview is really worth a read!

Credit goes out to http://fashionscansremastered.net/.

GALLERY LINK:
Scans from 2013 > Marie Claire (UK) – June 2013

As the gorgeous Gemma Arterton graces the June issue of Marie Claire she reveals how she really feels about her body and the amount of attention the press and public give it. ‘People don’t go on about it as much now, because I’ve said I just don’t care,’ she tells us. ‘But it’s good to talk about it.’

And her refreshing approach to image doesn’t stop there, expressing empathy towards other celebrities who feel pressured to loose weight.

Gemma Arterton adds: ‘Today I saw an actress I know and she’s lost so much weight. She’s gone from a size 12 to a size four within two months.’ While shocking, the British star knows this is an example of something on a much wider scale…

The former Bond girl continues: ‘There are so many good, intelligent actresses doing this, and I just think, “Why does that go hand in hand with the acting profession?” It shouldn’t. It lets the side down. It lets down team woman.’

And team woman is something very close to her heart as Gemma reveals she loves ‘going all feminist.’

We’re right behind you Ms Arterton!

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