Win a walk-on role with Ewan McGregor in Australian film Son Of A Gun

Ewan McGregor. Picture: Armando Gallo/Retna USA/Headpress Source: Supplied

The Daily Telegraph reports

Ewan McGregor this week begins work on Australian film Son Of A Gun. And one lucky film buff has a chance to get up close to the big-name movie star.

Director Julius Avery has spent four years working on the film, which this week begins shooting in Kalgoorlie.

"It's all action stations go at the moment," he said.

Son Of A Gun is his first feature and he has partnered with Telstra to offer a walk-on role in the film.

"It's not just about being in front of the camera, but also the experience of meeting the crew and, perhaps, bumping into Ewan," Avery said.

To enter, see facebook.com/telstra.

Naomi Watts honoured with award in Palm Springs

 

Naomi Watts arrives at the 24th annual Palm Springs International Film Festival Awards Gala in California. Picture: Frazer Harrison/Getty Images/AFP Source: AFP

The Daily Telegraph reports

Naomi Watts has been honoured at the 2013 Palm Springs International Film Festvial.

Watts was presented with the Desert Palm Achievement Award for Acting at the festival's gala night in Palm Springs, California, on Saturday night.

The British-born, Australian-raised actress was chosen to receive the honour for her performance in The Impossible.

In November, Festival chairman Harold Matzner told Variety.com that Watts's performance in the film was "worthy of an Oscar nomination".

Watts plays mother of three Maria Belon in the harrowing film, also starring Ewan McGregor, which is based on the true story of a family torn apart when the 2004 Asian tsunami engulfed Thailand's coastline.

The PSIFF is one of the largest film festivals in North America, welcoming 135,000 attendees each year for its line-up of new and celebrated international features and documentaries.

The festival is also known for its annual Black Tie Awards Gala, honouring the best achievements in film.

Past Desert Palm Achievement Award recipients include Halle Berry, Marion Cotillard, Natalie Portman and Kate Winslet.

Other actresses to be honoured at the gala night on Saturday night were Helen Mirren (Hitchcock) and Helen Hunt (The Sessions).

Riding a terror wave

Naomi Watts. Photo: Sahlan Hayes

Disaster proves harrowing for Naomi Watts, too, writes The Sydney Morning Herald’s Steven Rea

'Fear takes us to so many different places,'' Naomi Watts says. ''You can't really judge. One person's suffering is going to manifest itself differently than another's.''

The Australian actress is mulling how different people react in the face of catastrophe. Some summon up untapped courage, generosity, selflessness. And then there's the guy in The Impossible, the film Watts stars in with Ewan McGregor - based on the real-life ordeal of a family that is literally swept away in the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami - who won't lend out his mobile phone. So what if McGregor's character, lost and in shock, needs to let his parents know he is alive?

Set in Thailand, and inspired by the experiences of the Alvarez Belons, a family of five on Christmas vacation at a coastal resort when the tidal waves came crashing in, The Impossible screened at the Toronto International Film Festival in September.

Watts has received best-actress nominations from the Screen Actors Guild and the Golden Globes for her portrayal of Maria, who is separated from her husband and two youngest boys, and caught in a raging current of water and debris with her oldest son (a remarkable Tom Holland).

The first half of J.A. Bayona's masterful disaster movie follows Maria, who is resolved to find her family, to survive, no matter what. In Thailand, the tsunami resulted in more than 5000 deaths, with an additional 2800 missing and unaccounted for.

''If there is any good coming out of these kinds of disasters … it is that it strips away everything else,'' says Watts, speaking in Toronto. ''People come together. It's not about class and it's not about race. It's about: How are we going to get through this? And that's when the space for humanity comes back into it.''

Except for that guy with the mobile phone, maybe.

''Well,'' Watts adds with a smile, ''not always, but maybe the next moment.''

The star of David Lynch's Mulholland Drive, of David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises, of Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's 21 Grams, Watts says that making The Impossible - while nothing compared to what her real-life counterpart experienced - was physically harrowing work.

Those scenes of Watts swirling in the waves, with tree limbs and car parts shooting past her - that is not computer-generated imagery. ''I didn't know it was going to be so difficult,'' she says. ''They had it all very well prepared - we had allegedly the second largest water tank in the world, and they had these giant cups that we were anchored into … so you were just above water level, you could use your head, and you could use your arms so you looked like you were swimming … and you're on this track, and then a giant wave was coming towards you … and then side pumps were shooting more water, and all the garbage and debris …

''So, it got increasingly difficult, and then we noticed that we couldn't actually act, or speak. We were lucky if we could get one word out, and that word would be 'LU-CAS (Holland's character, Maria's son.)!'''

''It was tough, and then the underwater stuff was even more difficult. That was very scary,'' she says. ''But it was all marginal compared to what Maria and her family went through.''

Watts met with Maria Belon before shooting began.

''I didn't want to pry too much,'' she says. ''I didn't want to seem too actor-y. But she had so much to say, so it was perfect,'' Watts recalls. ''And something that I didn't quite understand at the time was that she said she felt completely sure of her instinct. That nothing got in the way of it. And she'd never had that feeling before. Which made her incredibly heroic, because every decision she makes seemed to be the right one.

''And I think that instinct is in us all, but it's so easy to second-guess, isn't it?

''Not that I want a disaster like this to happen for me to get to that place; it just overcame her, and she never doubted herself. And that's just an admirable strength in anyone, and it got her to that place of purity.''

The Philadelphia Inquirer

Not your typical disaster movie: Tsunami drama The Impossible hits cinemas

Scottish actor Ewan McGregor and Spanish film director Juan Antonio Bayona celebrate at the San Sebastian Film Festival in September. Picture: AP Source: AP

The Daily Telegraph reports

Eight years after the 2004 tsunami, Ewan McGregor and Naomi Watts star in a film recounting the tragedy.

They play a tourist family caught up in the tidal wave.

But the Spanish director of The Impossible insisted that the film - which starts with a spectacular recreation of the huge wall of water crashing onto a beachfront resort - is far from a typical "disaster movie."

"Even if the film tells the story in a very direct way, the conclusions it comes to are very complex, more complex than those usual with disaster movies," Juan Antonio Bayona told AFP.

The earthquake-triggered tsunami on December 26, 2004 killed about 230,000 people around the Indian Ocean, including large numbers of tourists caught in the resorts of Thailand and other Southeast Asian nations.

The movie is due out in the United States on December 21 and elsewhere over the next few months. It already opened in Spain and has screened at a number of film festivals, including in Los Angeles.

In the Spanish-financed movie, based on the real story of a Spanish family and filmed in the south of the country, McGregor and Watts play a couple on holiday with their children in Thailand, and separated when the tsunami hits.

"There was something immediately symbolic in the story of this family, which caught my attention when I heard about it for the first time," Bayona said after a November 4 screening at the American Film Institute festival in Hollywood.

After the tsunami crashes ashore and separates them, the seriously injured mother finds herself with her eldest son, while the father played by McGregor manages to save the two youngest children.

The movie portrays the battle for survival amid the havoc wreaked by the wave, from devastated hotels to an over-crowded hospital.

It opens with a family enjoying a luxury holiday in spectacular beach surroundings - before the wall of water hits.

"When we were looking for funding, the first thing we were told was, if we were going to make the film, we had to see" the catastrophe itself, Bayona said.

"In a film like this about the tsunami, you have to see the monster face to face, and plunge your camera inside it to make filmgoers really feel what it was like to be there."

The young director focused intensely on what the characters are thinking and feeling - notably the eldest son, played by Tom Holland - with techniques including unsparing close-ups and omnipresent music.

"The film starts with a shock, in a more documentary style, and as it progresses it takes on a more melodramatic tone... We want people watching to feel emotions as intensely as the characters themselves," Bayona said.

The movie also raises questions about "returning to normal... how do you come back to everyday reality after experiencing something like that?" he added.

But the director did not want to be didactic.

"There is no message, because they weren't given a message. We didn't want to be condescending. We followed them as closely as we could," he said.

Bayona made a name for himself with the unexpected success of his 2007 horror movie The Orphanage. His new film's US release in December will qualify it, just in time, for next year's Oscars in February.