I won't provide too much of an intro on this one, as that was pretty much covered in part one.

Here's the concluding part of my look at the collaborations between John Williams and Steven Spielberg...

Schindler's List

The score for Schindler's List is an incredible piece of work that compliments Steven Spielberg's Holocaust epic wonderfully. It's an interesting piece to get a hand on, as it seems to be simpler than much of his output, but in many ways it's much grander in scale.

The highlights of the score include the contributions from violinist Itzhak Perlman, whose work here is absolutely masterful.

For the most part, this is a perfect example of restraint and effective film composing , even if the film's finale is a little overcooked as it goes all out to tug on the heart strings. This is nothing short of a masterpiece and well deserved the Academy Award for Best Original Score.

The Lost World: Jurassic Park

Those of you following the Den Of Geek Twitter feed may recall a tweet a few weeks back stating that this was a superior score to that of Jurassic Park. Now, whilst I don't share that view (sorry, guys), I still think it's an incredibly strong follow-up.

I think the reason why I don't hold it in such high regard as the first is that I don't quite attach the same level of awe as I do to the first, as it brings back memories of seeing the dinosaurs for the first time, accompanied by Williams' majestic themes.

The key themes are present here, but for me, the pieces making up the rest of the score don't match what was heard previously. Even with that being the case, this is still a functional score that serves the set pieces well.

Amistad

A return to an historical epic, this time focussing on the mutiny by the slaves aboard La Amistad en route to America, produced another fantastic score by Williams. Not one that received the same level of attention as much of his other works for the great director, but one that showcases a high level of versatility, with Williams incorporating traditional African music and choruses alongside his typical orchestrations.

It's varied thematically, going from swelling drama to reflective introspection seamlessly.

Saving Private Ryan

This film features one of my favourite opening scenes in cinema. I remember seeing it on the big screen, open mouthed, as the long and brutal series of events rolled on. The film as a whole is hugely enjoyable and stands as one of the director's finest works.

However, the same compliment can't be paid towards Williams' score, which lacks the memorable cues that typify much of his work, and music is largely absent from some of the key scenes from the film.

I appreciate that this is a deliberate tactic to heighten the effect of certain scenes, but as a whole, I don't feel that the score does the material justice.

Artificial Intelligence: AI

I'm not a huge fan of AI, but I really do enjoy the score. The film itself was one of the projects that Stanley Kubrick had intended to make, but thematically, it's not a million miles away from some of Spielberg's projects, particularly E.T.

Whilst there's a lack of a rousing key theme, Williams still creates a hugely effective composition through largely ambient tracks that more closely resemble the works of Philip Glass than any of his own.

Minority Report

Williams is perhaps not most often associated with out and out sci-fi action thrillers, but he does a decent enough job here, even if he relies a little too heavily on themes covered by true masters of the genre, such as Horner and Goldsmith. And there's also an influence of Glass again here, although he's slightly less successful in conveying this aspect of the score when compared to his work on AI.

Catch Me If You Can

I'm a big fan of Catch Me If You Can, a film that's thoroughly entertaining with great performances, an interesting look and a rather ace score.

Williams' score is a Jazz-tinged classic that reflects the setting of the film, giving a great sense of time and place, whilst putting across the mood of playfulness and excitement that carries much of the film. It may lack some of the bold orchestrations and icon themes that the composer is known for, but this is a score that compliments the film perfectly and is constructed with a considerable level of skill.

The Terminal

Sure the film itself sees Spielberg go all out in terms of sentimentality, but it was a much more enjoyable film than I was expecting going in. It's no masterpiece, by any means, but it's a fairly entertaining film that features a score that sees Williams at his feel-good best, with elements of comedy as well as some of the jazz influences that made Catch Me If You Can so great, and in many ways, this is the superior score of the two.

War Of The Worlds

Given the iconic music composed by Jeff Wayne has been so popular for so many years, striking the right balance for a movie version of H.G. Wells' novel was always going to be tricky, and this is something of a mixed bag.

Williams makes the right choice in attempting to stamp his own identity on the works and creates some genuinely dramatic pieces with a backing of a full orchestra. There are some interesting effects used to create a sense of alien weirdness, but for me, this never quite escapes the shadow of Wayne's work and never reaches the dramatic heights heard in that recording.

Munich

Spielberg's film about the massacre of the Israeli Olympic team at the 1972 games in Munich is one of the director's bolder efforts in the later stage of his career, and sees a classic score from Williams after a few spluttering efforts for Spielberg collaborations that preceded it.

I think a large factor in this is that Williams is clearly more comfortable with both the setting of the film and the themes it explores. It's a much darker score in tone than much of his previous work, which makes it all the more interesting.

It shows that he's as adept at accompanying material such as this as he is with films like Star Wars, for which he completed his composition for Revenge Of The Sith in the same year as he composed this.

Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull

A return to the franchise that, in many ways, defined both Spielberg and Williams' work in the 80s saw mixed results. For Spielberg, this marked a huge misstep that saw the cheapening of a great series of films with a subpar fourth instalment.

How much of the film's failings are down to Lucas is up for debate, but this is a film I, along with many others, I'm sure, could easily have lived without.

Williams' score sees him return to the iconic themes that never fail to raise levels of excitement and also sees him introduce two other motifs to accompany scenes with the titular skull and the character of Mutt.

The score is a fine addition to the franchise, even if the film itself isn't.

So, that concludes my look at the feature film collaborations between Williams and Spielberg, showing that this is one of the most fruitful parings in cinematic history.

I'm planning other Williams pieces that will look at the best of his non-Spielberg collaborations and his work on Star Wars at a later date. So, if you have any suggestions on scores you would like to see, include them in the comments below or get in touch on Twitter @GlenTChapman.

• See all the Music in the movies

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Jeremiah Chechik has a broad directing CV. From his debut on National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation, through to the delightful Benny & Joon, the troublesome The Avengers and his subsequent television work, he's told us in some depth about the highs and lows of his career. And it all kicked off when he worked with John Hughes...

What a first job you had! Going through your credits, the first, job National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation. You land a John Hughes movie. I couldn't find out much of the story before that. So, I wonder if you could just fill us in a little bit?

Yeah. I started as a photographer, as a fashion photographer.

That was for Vogue?

Yeah, and then I kind of grew bored and wanted to get back to doing more dramatic stuff, believe it or not, and I had studied theatre when I was in university and so I had a background in that.

I also had a background in music, and I had a background in design, and I thought, well, maybe filmmaking is the best kind of use for what I know. I chose to try and go into film.

Now, I didn't know anything about how you would actually do it. So, I started showing my work to directors, who hooked me up with production companies, and I became a commercial director.

And so, I did them for quite a few years and, at some point, I had made these commercials that became quite iconic here in the US. They were very dark and sexy and sort of a little bit ahead of their time in terms of style. And what happened was they gained the notice of [Stanley] Kubrick, who had mentioned them as his favourite American filmmaking, ironically, in a New York Times article.

By the Monday following the Sunday, the phone rang off the hook. And it was Kathy Kennedy and Steven Spielberg and they invited me to come up and see them at Amblin. Oddly, I had just moved here from New York maybe three weeks earlier. I thought, like, wow, I should have done this earlier. [laughs]

We had a terrific first meeting and I walked out of the offices with a deal at Amblin and Steven, Frank Marshall, Kathy as my producers to develop a film that took place in and around the Apollo Theater in New York City.

So, I was beside myself happy and I felt, wow, it's pretty easy to break into the film business.

[Laughs]

We developed this film and, at a certain point - the film was to be distributed by Warner, so I did develop a very strong and cohesive relationship with a lot of the executives and with the people running the studio, because I'd been blessed by Spielberg.

So, we got to the point where I loved the script and we were going to make it as a very small movie, because it was about unknowns at the Apollo in New York. And Warner, Terry Semel, who I was close with over the course of my filmmaking career, said, "Why are we making such a little movie? Let's make a big movie."

In which case, what he meant is a star vehicle, and I felt, well, stars and unknowns don't go together, in terms of what you can do. And I didn't think they would achieve that. So, I backed out of the project, which never did get made.

They eventually wanted to do it the way I wanted it, but the ship had sailed on the Apollo and it had become overly commercialised on TV.

But, what had happened was they, at Warners, thought, "We like this guy a lot." And they started to send me scripts. And the script that really piqued my interest was [National Lampoon's] Christmas Vacation. And the reason is I had never done any comedy - ever.

I hadn't seen the first two, and so I wasn't really influenced by anything other than the fact that it was a big - at the time - their big Christmas movie, and comedy. And I just felt if I could crack this maybe there's a whole other world of filmmaking for me.

I was nervous about accepting it, because I didn't know about Chevy and I wasn't sure if it was too commercial. But I agreed to do it and I had just a fantastic time doing it.

I just sublimated to all those directors who did those great classic comedies: Sturges and Wilder and Hawks. Those guys really became my dead mentors, as it were.

I decided that I would try and make a movie that would, believe it or not, that would have some lasting effect - never expecting it to do so. 

That's how I got my first film!

So, it went Kubick, Spielberg, Warner Bros, Terry Semel, John Hughes - in a fairly compact space of time?

Yeah. [laughs]

It was kind of heady because it was going fast and I was doing a lot of commercials, so I was working a lot. But I did have the bug to do this. And John and I - I was one of those guys that got one with him, and was very shocked and saddened by his death this last  year. Such a surprise.

Obviously, John Hughes did have a reputation in some quarters for being quite difficult to deal with. I'm curious how he treated you as a first time feature director.

That's a terrific question because, yes, he didn't suffer fools and he was really - Most people who knew him, really, at some point in their lives, had a major falling out with him. Over something. 

Tom Jacobson, who was my producer at the time, was running his company, or running the production end of his company, and had known him quite well and, in fact, did have a good relationship with him and he, basically, said, "Be yourself." And I was.

I met John and I found... I don't think he wanted Chris Columbus to do the movie. This is what I hear. But Chevy wanted me, Warners wanted me and so we said, "Okay, I'll meet." And somehow, he accepted me to be director. He liked my work and we got on.

At the beginning, when we started to shoot, as luck would have it, I loved working with him as a writer. That was very, very exciting at the time, and even in retrospect, when I think of all the things that I learned from him, in terms of structure, development, and comedy in general. I didn't appreciate it as much then as I do now.

Because I just thought, "Well, that's just how it happens." But, you know, as you do more work and you work with more people, you realise what a specialised sensibility he had.

He was starting to prepare - oh, god, I forget what movie - I think it was, like Uncle Buck or Home Alone - one of those movies that he would be shooting in Chicago and I would be shooting at Warners. And he came to the set on the first day. We didn't have snow and it was very, kind of, tense and we didn't know what we were going to do if it didn't snow. We were hauling in snow to Colorado and then, of course, it started to snow and it never snowed so much in ten years as it did that week. So, we were fortunate.

And then the shoot started to get underway and he was just thrilled with the dailies and he just went back to Chicago to prep his movie. And I kept thinking, "Gee, John should come and hang with me. I really like him and we talk often."

I would say, basically, "John, I wanna do this and that," and he would go, "Well, that sounds great, Jeremiah." And I would say, "Well, the studio may be giving me some push back on these things." And he said, "Oh, just have them call me." So then, the studio would give me a note, I'd go, "That's great. Clear it with John." Then, I'd call John and go, "They're gonna call you." [And he said] "I'm not taking their calls." 

Then, over the course of the movie I really felt that I had tremendous control, both from him and the studio, up to the end of making the movie. Even in the cut, I remember screening the very first assembly for him. He flew in and he just looked at me and he said, "Wow. You have a really funny movie. This is really great. Finish it," and went back to Chicago. [laughs]

He didn't wanna touch what was happening. And I so appreciate him not saying that I was so brilliant or talented or anything, but a lot of it is just the way it falls off the truck. The chemistry was good, the script was good and I sublimated to my directorial ancestors and I did the best I could. I just thought, "Well, if I find it funny, maybe someone else will."

How do you direct a comedy talent like Chevy Chase? How much do you interject in his performance and how much do you stand back and let him do what he does?

Well, I think it depends on the scene. And I would say that that's true of most anything, not Chevy or any actor, whether they're famous or not, accomplished or not, or unknown or not. I think that it all has to do with the intention of the scene and making sure that everybody is moving in the same direction. Hence, the title 'director'.

I think it's up to you to provide a very clear direction and intention - overall, not how to get there so specifically, but where you want to end up. And I think that doing that you also have to create an atmosphere on set that allows everyone to really do their finest work.

Some directors like to keep a very tense set. They think that that promotes really hard work. I like to keep it light and fun and have the actors be able to just work a lot on their finest instincts. And if I feel the scene is sliding sideways for one reason or another, I will go and I'll make a very, very strong case and even insist on trying to go in another direction. But that may happen frequently or infrequently, depending on what it is.

The final thing, with comedy, is you have to let things happen. Look for opportunities, the happy accidents, and build on them. And so you're always looking for detail and you're always for ways to squeeze the smallest detail of comedy out of something that isn't even written particularly as funny.

It sounded like you had an amazing couple of years and you got your first picture moving very, very quickly. The film you did after that did take a few years to come along and was embroiled with all sorts of problems.

I have to say from the off, I think Benny & Joon is such a lovely movie. I think the chemistry between Johnny Depp and Mary Stuart Masterson is really good. It surprises me when you see how calm it is on screen just how troubled it seemed to be behind the scenes setting it all up.

Well, you know, it's funny. You're saying that, but it wasn't terribly problematic. I mean, it may have appeared, from the outside, problematic. I know the difference. Because I have had difficult movies to do. That was not difficult.

The development of the screenplay, which I was very, very involved in at MGM, Alan Ladd [Jr] was running the company and - talk about an artist's friend - he really let me work with the writer, and we focused so carefully on the nuance.

When it came to cast, I wanted to get Johnny and I just met with Johnny and he just loved it and said, "Yeah, yeah. Let's do it."

And Mary Stuart Masterson, I liked her just because of her kind of soulful quality, but the part that ended up with Aidan was going to be - believe it or not - Woody Harrelson. Woody and I had met and he loved it also, was going to do it and I thought, "That's great."

Now, him making the movie was not the trigger. We had gotten the budget. We were working with all actors of some note, and at the last minute Woody got that Demi Moore movie -

Indecent Proposal.

That's right, and wanted to do that and bowed out. This happens all the time. Who could blame him - work on a small little tiny movie with Johnny Depp, who wasn't the star he is today? Or work with the legends at the time. So, I didn't blame him. He went off and did it and I guess the media made a bigger mess of it. And I just thought, "We'll get Aidan Quinn." So, we just went to Aidan, he said yes and that was it.

So, it wasn't really that much drama. It was maybe a few days of 'we lost Woody. Let's get somebody else.' And Aidan was just so fantastic. Within one day, who remembered Woody Harrelson's approach to the part? It just wasn't part of it. And I think time certainly supported that.

Were you a Buster Keaton fan before you got to the film?

Yeah. I was a big fan of Buster Keaton, more so than Chaplin, even. It turns out, coincidentally, so is Johnny, and so we spent an awful lot of time -

There's a movie theater here in LA called The Silent Movie Theatre, whose owner has sadly passed away. I think he got murdered like ten years ago, or something like that - but he and his family had - they may still - one of the largest collections of original print silents, and we got the studio to make a deal with them and Johnny and I would go there in afternoon and screen - on the big screen - all the classic silents, two-reelers.

Of course, we hired an organist. [laughs] We spent [a long time] in that theatre. You know, it's one thing to look at these old movies on the small screen. It's quite another to see them in the tableau that were originally intended to show off how spectacular the physical comedy was.

That rekindled my absolute adoration for those guys. Where I appreciated them before, I jumped into appreciating them for the geniuses that they were: Lloyd, Chaplin, Keaton, and there's more.

It was a fun, fun, beautiful movie to make. Every day of it was a joy - the crew and the cast stuck together like glue. After shooting we would all - we would not disappear to our hotels, but we would stay on stage and play music and then we'd order in food. And every weekend someone or other, crew member or cast member, would host a party at their place. It was just one of those things that bonded us, I think, for life.

And is it as good an experience as you've ever had making a film?

It was. Yeah, I could say that pretty quick.

Tomorrow: in part two of our interview, Jeremiah talks about working with Sharon Stone in Diabolique, and just what went wrong with the Warner Bros movie of The Avengers...

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Yahoo! Movies has debuted the latest poster for Scream 4, a film that's a bit closer to release than you might realise. The new entry in the saga arrives in April, and according to ShockTillYouDrop, a few reshoots are currently taking place in the Michigan area.

Is that a cause for concern? Not necessarily. Late-ish reshoots, while not massively common, aren't always the panic button that they may first appear, so our suggestion is to wait and see what April brings.

Just to tease you a little bit for it, though, here's that brand new poster...

ShockTillYouDrop

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The casting of a new Superman has the potential to be a huge moment in any geek's week, but with the character's stock damaged following the underachieving Superman Returns, it's hard not to be a little cautious about it.

The geeks' choice was undoubtedly Jon Hamm, an actor whose performance as Don Draper in Mad Man already shares much with the Man of Steel, a lonely individual, disconnected from his past, possessing gentle inner strength and leading a double (occasionally triple) life. All you'd have to do is put a cowlick in his hair and you're virtually looking at Superman already.

However, many, including Hamm, for that matter, considered him too old for the role. Which begs the question: how old is too old? This is a story about a super man, after all. If anything, the concern should be casting someone too young (something that didn't bother previous director Bryan Singer, who chose an actor younger than Tom Welling, who was still playing 'Superboy' over in Smallville.)

A character like Superman doesn't just rely on his strength and powers to inspire people, but his experience, empathy and, to some extent, authority. The marketable appeal of actors in their mid-20s is easy to understand, but we'll know the time has come for movies to treat Superman seriously when a director dares to cast someone in their 30s in the title role. Someone with the gravitas and life experience to make you believe he knows what he's talking about.

Still, maybe Henry Cavill can adequately pretend. That's what he's paid to do, after all. Bearing the constraints of the industry in mind, Cavill does seem like a good choice. In particular, his relative obscurity works for him the same way Brandon Routh's did. The idea that you might cast someone more popular, or with inherent drawing power, is easily dismissed. In a Superman film, the actor should not overshadow the icon.

This is because the Superman story is, at its heart, about an outsider showing us how good we can be. The last thing you want in the role is an ‘insider'. As much as the much-rumoured Nic Cage Superman would have been a true sight to behold (whatever your opinion of The Cage!), it would have given Superman the wrong power balance. Just because he can fly, it doesn't mean he gets to talk down to us mortals. That's sort of the point.

Casting someone on his way up, rather than someone at the top, neatly sidesteps that concern that we might find Superman's message trite, patronising and self-inflated. We already know we'll never be Nic Cage, but watching Cavill step forward and make the role his own would remind us that even the best of us was a nobody once.

Of course, it all depends on what the story is, and as yet, there are no details. One can only hope that Zack Snyder shies away from J. Michael Straczynski's recent Superman: Earth One as a template, particularly given the faithful manner in which he translated 300 and Watchmen to the screen.

Clearly written with the intention of giving Superman's origin a cinematic reboot, Earth One features a Superman initially more interested in earning the big bucks than saving humanity, and a woeful villain in the form of alien general Tyrell, who brings an alien fleet to Earth looking for the last son of Krypton in order to fulfil the terms of his demolition contract.

You know a re-telling of the Superman origin has taken a wrong turn when it ends with the edict "Avenge the death of Krypton!", and the hoody-wearing sulky version of the character that permeates Straczynski's comic is worryingly present in the mind when you consider that Cavill was Stephenie Meyer's first choice for moody sulky Edward Cullen in the Twilight films. Let's hope it's a coincidence.

Still, the casting of a new Superman is but the first of the many hurdles that a Superman director has to leap. Snyder has arguably cleared this one without much trouble. Nothing about Cavill screams 'mistake'. We just have to hope Snyder knows how to use him better than Bryan Singer used, or rather, didn't use, Brandon Routh.

See Also:

• Henry Cavill is the next Superman
• Jon Hamm confirms he's been "aged out" of Superman

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As he collected an award at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival over the weekend, Christopher Nolan was inevitably quizzed about the current state of his third Batman movie, The Dark Knight Rises.

There was nothing particularly radical about the questions posed to Nolan, although, arguably, there aren't massively radical queries aching to be put forward right now. But, for instance, he was asked where the title of the new Batman film came from, and Nolan joked, "I banged my head against the wall."

He did go on to say, though, "We've worked on it a long time - David Goyer and myself. We're about 12 weeks away from shooting. We start in May." Pressed over whether he was always sure he was going to do the third movie, Nolan said, "It was about finishing the story."

What Nolan wouldn't be drawn on, however, is whether we'll definitely be seeing Anne Hathaway as Catwoman in the new movie. If you remember, the official statement from Warner Bros said that she'd been cast as Selina Kyle, which has led many of us to, not unreasonably, suspect that she would evolve into Catwoman as the film progressed.

When Nolan was asked about it? As Coming Soon reports, "he smiled coyly and wouldn't say a word." (we'd still be stunned if Hathaway wasn't Catwoman, though)

You can read more on what Nolan had to say at Coming Soon, here, while The Dark Knight Rises is released in July 2012.

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Awkward silences. Disbelieving glances. Sarcastic remarks. We're up to episode four of the BBC's glossy sitcom, Episodes, and already its style and situations are beginning to feel familiar.

Los Angeles may be its backdrop, but Episodes is, in essence, a sitcom based around two or three people bickering. Nebbish Sean and prickly wife Beverly bicker over attractive women and alterations to their script. Prickly Beverly and swaggering, arrogant actor Matt LeBlanc snipe and peck at one another every time they meet, an undercurrent of barely repressed attraction threatening to erupt at any moment.

As the production of the increasingly tawdry sitcom within a sitcom, Pucks!, rumbles on, lead actor Matt LeBlanc loses custody of his children and spends most of this week's episode in a drunken, self-pitying nadir. Forced to chaperone the inebriated LeBlanc from an LA bar and back to the safety of his house, Beverly and Sean's sympathies are stretched to breaking point.

In terms of plot, that's basically it. The show boils down to a series of disconnected scenes thereafter, most of which drag on for too long. There's an awkward scene in a bar, two or three awkward scenes in a car, an awkward scene on the steps of LeBlanc's ex-wife's house, one in Sean and Beverly's kitchen, and so on.

There's the hope throughout that these various awkward situations are being stacked up for one final, satisfying pay-off (as was the case in episode two), but this instalment ultimately amounts to little more than a sequence of sketches revolving around themes like celebrity, drunkenness and the vacuity of Hollywood.

On a side note, the show's parping, repetitive theme tune and tiptoeing incidental music is really starting to get on my nerves.

There are moments, however, where Episodes shows glimmers of its earlier promise. The brief glimpses of Beverly and Sean's bowdlerized sitcom are endearingly horrible, and it's hard not to see why LeBlanc signed up for such an unsympathetic role. He may be an unreconstructed boor, but he nevertheless gets most of the best lines.

Occasional glimmers aside, the gap between US and UK comic sensibilities appears to be widening in this week's instalment. Episodes has neither the three-jokes-per-minute slickness of an American comedy, nor the sharp observation of a British show like Extras, which appears to be the show's prime inspiration.

Episodes' enduring strength is the quality of its cast. All three lead actors, Mangan, Greig and Le Blanc, are likeable and acquit themselves well, but all the likeability in the world can't make up for a flat script or uneven pacing, and sadly, this week's episode is the least satisfying and cohesive yet.

Read our review of episode 3 here.

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This review may contain spoilers.

3.11 Reciprocity

It's been a while, but Fringe left me genuinely uncertain about where it's heading after watching Reciprocity. My head scratching and chin rubbing done, I'm still not entirely sure the destination the writers have picked, or what the longer implications of what happen in this story are.

I've decided not to spoil it, which means I can't really say what it is that's flummoxed me so completely, but it's reasonably safe to divulge that there is a game changing event that happens in here that could turn the Fringe universe(s) entirely upside down.

Massive Dynamic has constructed the machine that Peter was drawn at the centre of, and when he approaches, all manner of weird things start to happen. That provides one thread of the story, while the other is spawned from the discovery of a shape-shifter body. At a simple level, this plot is a simple 10 Little Indians rehash, where someone is going around killing off shape-shifters that are embedded in Massive Dynamic, but who is it?

In a typical Murder She Wrote-mode, we're thrown a series of likely candidates, none of whom are actually the culprit. If this had been the whole show, I'd have been throwing darts at it currently, but there's so much going on here beneath the surface that the simple detective story elements are almost just gilding.

But what I really enjoy in Fringe is the character interactions, and Reciprocity doesn't disappoint. There's a wonderfully obtuse subplot about Walter trying to regrow part of his brain using a retrovirus developed by William Bell. Without labels for the lab samples, Walter tries pot luck and ends up with DNA from a chimp in his system. While he doesn't climb trees, he becomes very partial to bananas, and there are some wonderful exchanges with Astrid on the subject.

Astrid Farnsworth is probably the least developed Fringe persona, so it was good to see she got plenty of screen time this week.

But the majority of the show rotates around Peter, and Joshua Jackson is working hard here to give his character more layers than the 'nice guy' persona he was handed initially. Clearly, the plot has major plans for Peter, and for him to do those things he's going to need to be quite a different person than the one we've met so far. The changes have already begun, but this is the first story in which we get to see the consequences of his transition to the dark side.

The question posed by the events is this story is: now that they've built the doomsday machine, how long will it be before Peter can't resist the temptation to get in it? He looked eager to have a go when he first saw it, irrespective of the potential mayhem it might unleash. It's a certainty he will end up in it, probably in the season finale. But will it kill him or the entire other dimension?

On an entirely different subject, it was good to see that Fringe initially did better on Friday in last week's figures than it had in its previous slot. I'm interested to see if it can maintain the momentum with this story or head the way that Fox intends it to go. If it doesn't, then some Fox exec is going to be sitting with a Persian cat on his lap asking, "Mr. Fringe, you persist in defying my efforts to provide an amusing death for you..."

There's also been tweets from the supposedly retired Leonard Nimoy suggesting he might be returning to the show, presumably to play the alternate William Bell?

No, Fox. Fringe isn't dead just yet. It might yet be a very lively corpse, from all accounts.

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There's a lot going on in K-20: The Legend Of The Black Mask. Part superhero film, part steampunk alternate history, part detective mystery, and part Indiana Jones And The Atomic MacGuffin, it's certainly not a film that is shy about referencing its many influences, and referencing them often. 

This is no Tarantino-esque game of film reference trainspotting, however. At its heart, K-20 is a surprisingly classical action adventure, and is one of the best examples of the genre to come along in many years.

Adapted from a popular series of detective novels by So Kitamura, the film is set in an alternate Tokyo where World War Two never happened, and Japanese society is stratified into strict class groups, with the rich enjoying immense wealth at the top and the poor living in squalor at the bottom, with no hope in sight.

K-20, or the Fiend with Twenty Faces, is a professional thief and master of disguise, who steals from the rich, and doesn't give to the poor. His power and ability are such that he has set his sights on a newly developed energy beam generator that, were he able to harness its power, he would be able to take over Tokyo, and perhaps, the world.

However, much like V For Vendetta (a clear inspiration), the titular masked vigilante isn't the main focus of K-20. It's the story of a talented circus performer, Heikichi Endo, (played by national heartthrob and star of House Of Flying Daggers, Takeshi Kaneshiro) who is framed by K-20 and is forced to take on the guise of the Fiend with Twenty Faces himself, in order to track down the real one and prove his innocence.

Accompanying him on his quest for justice and the truth are the wealthy, yet plucky heiress, Yoko Hashiba (Takako Matsu), and her fiancée, Chief of Police Kogoro Akechi, played by the fantastic Tôru Nakamura.

One criticism of K-20 is how derivative it is of other film. There's certainly a thin line between writing a cinematic 'love letter' to a genre and just openly ripping people off, but K-20 belongs firmly in the first category. There is clearly a real affection for American comic books and action cinema that shines through, from the excellent John Williams-inspired score to the grandstanding, explosive finale.

Crucially, K-20 lifts all of the good parts of its influences and none of the bad. There is a training montage that is similar enough to the same scene in Raimi's original Spider-Man to draw the comparison, but while adding enough cool scenery and wild parkour moves to make it into something new.

Similarly, the look of the city is very reminiscent of Nolan's Batman films, with their grimy steampunk by way of 1940s detective-noir aesthetic. K-20 forgoes the dark, sombre tone of those films, however, maintaining a light touch throughout and a genuinely funny sense of humour, the cheery little brother to Nolan's moody teenagers.

K-20 is a fantastic looking film, conjuring up a fantastical, yet totally immersive world that looks sumptuous on Blu-ray. The special effects are easily some of the best I've ever seen in a non-American feature. Iit's very refreshing to see a film that uses CGI sparingly, with the bulk of the spectacle being provided by impeccable set design, old-school practical effects, and some magnificent stunt work.

The set pieces are all great, with a particularly breathtaking rooftop fight scene being the highlight. Writer-director Shimako Sato (Tale Of A Vampire) does a fantastic job of bringing the K-20 series to life, and on the strength of this film, Kathryn Bigelow could finally have a rival for the title of greatest female action director. Hell, they'd both be in the running for best action director, full stop.

While there is a whole lot to love about K-20, it does have a few key flaws that stop it from being a potential classic. For one thing, it dips noticeably in the middle, with a lot of scenes heavy with social commentary that isn't incisive enough to be involving, and instead just comes off as dull and  portentous. Similarly, the film is way too long, and could have done with at least twenty minutes being chopped out of it to make it a more satisfying experience overall.

It's a shame that K-20 hasn't seemed to have been afforded a big marketing push in the UK, along the lines of Shaolin Soccer or Kung Fu Hustle, as there is definitely potential for a crossover appeal that would extend beyond fans of Asian cinema.

As it is, though, there is something to be said for discovering K-20 as a pleasant surprise. It's a lot of fun, and definitely worth checking out if you're a fan of the genre. It's quietly one of the best adventure films of recent years.

Extras on the disc include a behind-the-scenes featurette and cast and crew introductions.

Film:
Disc:

K-20: The Legend Of The Black Mask is out now on Blu-ray and available from the Den Of Geek Store.

Follow Paul Martinovic on Twitter @paulmartinovic, or for more babble check out his blog here.

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This one doesn't feel like anything other than a long shot, and perhaps that's what it should be, too. But here goes.

You may already know that there are plans afoot for a fifth Die Hard movie. (In fact, the idea is apparently to take things to Die Hard 6, and leave the franchise at that point.) Bruce Willis has previously said that the script for the fifth film has been penned, and the idea is to shoot the movie at some point this year, for release in 2012.

However, over at What's Playing, there's a rumour that's cropped up, that suggests that the next Die Hard film will bring back the Gruber family for its villain. You might recall, then, that we had Hans Gruber in Die Hard, and Simon Gruber in Die Hard With A Vengeance. The chatter now is of a further sibling, although the gender of said sibling hasn't been talked about. Again, this is a pinch-of-salt rumour.

The working title for the film remains Die Hard 24/7.

What's Playing

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You might have caught the news last week that The King's Speech is the frontrunner in terms of nominations for this year's Oscars. It's a smashing film, too, featuring some very strong performances (not least from Geoffrey Rush).

It's also being distributed by The Weinstein Company, and if anyone knows the history of the Weinstein brothers through their work at Miramax, they'll know that few can put together an Oscar campaign with such effect.

However, one of The Weinstein Company's plans for The King's Speech hasn't gone down very well at all. The problem the film faces in getting bums on seats to see it in the US, however, is the language within it. Without giving too much away if you've not seen it, there's a moment or two absolutely littered with F-bombs, which is genuinely pivotal to the film's story.

The film got a 12A rating in the UK, a surprisingly relaxed certificate for a film with so many occurrences of such language (after the BBFC reportedly accepted an argument that the cussing was contextual, and not aimed at anyone). But in the US, it's been hit with an R, which The Weinstein Company reasons is hurting the film's box office performance.

The answer that's being mooted? To put out a cut version of the film with a PG-13 rating, designed to be in cinemas for February. To get the PG-13 rating, the scene of said cussing would have to be trimmed right back at best. Which, for my money, would leave a hole in the midst of the film.

Director Tom Hooper, quoted in Entertainment Weekly, isn't keen at all, and who can blame him? It's not like he's packed his film with unnecessary swearing, or characters with the potty mouths of action movie villains. Hooper said,"I wouldn't support cutting the film in any way. I think we looked at whether it's possible to bleep out the fucks and stuff, but I'm not going to actually cut that part."

The very thought that a modern day cinema release was being considered with Jerry Springer Show-style bleeping over foul language is worrying as it stands. But appreciating that The Weinstein Company needs to make its money, that it backed the film, and that The King's Speech is its biggest hit in a long time, surely this PG-13 cut needs to be nipped in the bud?

Granted, we, as an audience, would have a choice as to which version to see, but I'd feel sorry for those who caught the chopped version. Why? Because the scene that would need to be tinkered with is brilliant. It's not swearing for swearing's sake. It just works, and works really well.

What will we do next? Cut the violence out of Saving Private Ryan? Release a version of Schindler's List in colour? Tell the cast of Chicago to put a few more clothes on, else they'll catch their death? How far do you go to make a few million more bucks for an awards-attracting movie?

We'll see how this one pans out. To be clear, The Weinstein Company hasn't commented on this furore at this stage, and it might just be an idea that it's mooted at one point, which has been turned into something else by the might of the Internet.

The firm also, surely, has a case with the MPAA, which has slapped a movie with an R rating purely on the basis of language that you'd hear every morning on the school bus. But the MPAA is not a moveable beast, it seems,

This one will, no doubt, be sorted one way or the other over the coming weeks, and here's hoping the right thing is done. For now, here's that Entertainment Weekly report.

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If you've written off Bridesmaids as another throwaway rom-com before you've got to the poster, then here might be the point where you get interested in the movie. Because this upcoming comedy from Universal has something of a pedigree to it.

Firstly, it's produced by Judd Apatow. Appreciating that Apatow isn't everyone's cup of tea, he's been responsible nonetheless for some of the most successful (and, I'll say it, funniest) comedies of the past few years. Secondly, though, it's directed by Paul Feig.

Apatow and Feig together? If the Freaks And Geeks light in your head hasn't gone off yet, then you need to go and buy a boxset of one of the very best television series of the past 20 years. It's a show that never really had much exposure in the UK, and was canned inside a season in the US. But it's an outstanding, funny, and really quite moving show, that launched the careers of James Franco, Seth Rogen, Martin Starr and Jason Segel.

Paul Feig created the show and Judd Apatow produced it with him.

But there's a further reason to get excited about Bridesmaids. And that's Kristen Wiig. Not only is she starring as a maid of honour, who has to battle it out with other bridesmaids for the attention of the bride, but Wiig has also written the script (along with Annie Mumolo).

We're in.

Which leads us to the first poster for the movie that you can see below. We'd suspect it's the trailer that's going to help this one, but we're keen to give the movie a push, for the reasons outlined above. It's at least worth marking on your radar as a possible, we'd suggest...

The film arrives in the US on 13th May, and the UK on 24th June. It is out in Malaysia on 7th July, too, in case you're interested.

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As we noted in the spoiler-free review of the opening episode of the BBC's Outcasts, this is a show that might just be a tough sell. It tells the story of survivors of the planet Earth, as the few who made it from the planet settle on the gloomy world of Carpathia. And we wondered, as we watched the opening episode, what tricks the BBC would employ to get people back for episode two, after such a downbeat episode one?

Now we know the answer. For the BBC is really giving Outcasts a push, not only confirming that it'll be debuting on BBC One on Monday 7th February at 9pm, but also revealed that the second episode will be going out a day later, on Tuesday 8th February

This is a bold and confident move for the show, and we hope it works. There are the building blocks of something really quite interesting in Outcasts, and we suspect it needs an episode or two to warm up.

We'll have reviews of the show as it airs, starting next week.

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Next Monday and Tuesday, the BBC sends its latest science-fiction drama series, Outcasts, into the world. It's an ambitious show, and this collection of images from the first two episodes hopefully gets that across.

The usual drill applies, here. Click on the one you want to make bigger, and the minions of the Internet will do the rest of the work for you.

We'll have our spoiler-packed Outcasts review live for when the credits roll on Monday night...

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In part one of our interview with Jeremiah Chechik, he talked about working with John Hughes, being noticed by Kubrick and Spielberg, and making the wonderful Benny & Joon.

Here, he takes us through working with movie stars, on both Diabolique, and on Warner Bros' big-screen take on The Avengers. Incidentally, we should point out that this interview was conducted before the recent stories about Kevin Smith and Bruce Willis on the set of Cop Out surfaced.

Without further ado...

I interviewed Kevin Smith last year, and talked about working with Bruce Wills on Cop Out. The interesting thing talking to him was it was very clear that the mechanics of making the movie had changed as soon as a movie star got onto the set.

The next film that you tackled, Diabolique, had two very different things to it, as I see it. Number one, it moved completely away from comedy. It couldn't have been further away. And number two, for the first time you had - I'm being a bit disingenuous to Chevy Chase - but at the point Sharon Stone was there, that was a big Sharon Stone vehicle.

What was the attraction of the project? How was it making a film like that? How did it differ?

Well, again I wanted to stretch my wings and do different things. I never just saw myself as a director of just pure comedy. I guess at the time also I was - do you know the movie Sullivan's Travels?

Yes.

It's a Preston Sturges classic about a very, very successful filmmaker of really broad stupid comedies who has this yearning, the desperation to make a very important film. And the film that he has always wanted to make just about hobos in America and that kind of social movie, was to be called O Brother, Where Art Thou? That's where that title comes from.

He always wanted to make that movie and, of course, the studio hates that idea, but they go along with it and he decides to go on the road - disguise himself as a hobo - and, of course, he gets lost in the real world and is tormented, put in jail, prison camp - chain gang - and  learns to appreciate comedy. It's pretty spectacular.

I felt that I went, or had been through that journey myself. But Diabolique was a chance to do something very, very challenging. I wanted to make a movie that took an original story, Diabolique, of the French film, which I thought was a flawed and misogynist film and just by, not changing the story, but changing the point of view, create a feminist story.

I wondered if that was possible. So, that was my artistic challenge to it.

And Don Roos, who we'd hired to do the script - and you know his filmography and he was just such an amazingly good writer... not was, he is. So, Don and I worked on the script for about a year and at some point I thought, "Let's make this movie inexpensive in Morocco, in the sun." The studio went, "We want noir. We want noir. We want noir."

Over the course of that year of development, and before, Sharon had been calling me and sending me some material of her own. Now, I'd never met her up to this moment. But she had been sending me stuff and I, of course, was - who wouldn't be flattered to have, at the time she was a very big star - and I engaged with her on the phone. Some of the material wasn't for me, I didn't like it, blah blah blah.. But, over the course of, say, maybe twenty-five hours of phone conversation, you kind of get to know somebody a bit - and should we? We really have to work together.

Well, flash forward. There was some Hollywood party I was at, and we were standing around, Sharon came up and she knew everybody. She didn't really know who I was - by sight, anyway - and I was kind of stood there and was quiet. [Somebody] introduced us and she whisked me away and we spent some time really talking about sensibility, and film in general. And then that was it for a few months, until Warners finally approved the script that Don and I were working on.

I loved the screenplay, I have to say, and they said, "We'll make the movie, but we need a movie star." I called Sharon's home from the boardroom and I said, "Sharon, It's Jeremiah. 'Diabolique.'" And she said, "I'm in." And that was it.

That simple?

And then, of course, I had the issue of I had to find another woman who was equally iconic to her. It couldn't be weighted unless it was somebody iconic. And I was an enormous fan of Isabelle Adjani, and she's a legend. And so I flew to Paris and I took her out for dinner. And I speak French so, I don't know, we became very, very good friends that night and she just trusted me, and she only commits to a movie every four or five years, so I was like, y'know! [laughs]

You had JJ Abrams in it, didn't you?

JJ's in the film, which is really fun. He had read with Donal. They both had offices, I think, in west LA at the time and he had read with Donal and they're just so good together. It was really fun. Another whole long, story.

But, the movie itself was extraordinarily turbulent. It was a very difficult everyday experience. The film turned out the way I wanted it to, love it or hate it. It really did. But I had to battle it constantly and battle a lot of personalities.

The irony is, just a few weeks ago, somebody re-reviewed it and gave it a beautiful review, and I don't say that just because it was a good review, but it was an analytical review that really addressed the intentions of the movie as I spelled out for you earlier.

In Europe, the movie was very well received, oddly. In France, in particular, all the press there. And I think part of the problem that we find with movies - and that certainly suffered from them at the time - is the hype of the movie.

I mean, I'll give you an example: the opening, the premiere night was like Day Of The Locust. People had printed thousands of fake tickets. In Spain there were near riots. When you get hype like that over a star [like Sharon] - and her ability to manoeuvre and manipulate the press is legendary, both for good and bad, - she really played it, and, god knows, she's a force of nature.

But, I think that a lot of it was that the press had turned against her, in particular, at that moment, and my movie saw her for that.

In the light of - years later, it's starting to emerge, as they do Blu-rays and all the rest of it - people are paying attention to it again and maybe being a lot more, like I said, analytical or focused in their reviews. Not that that would ever stop me.

But that was an experience unlike any other, but doing the drama was something that I loved.  

Can I just rewind slightly, because I wanted to ask you about Tall Tale, actually. I'd never seen that. I'd never come across it until I was looking it up, but that looks a really fun little project.

Oh, that movie is awesome. It's one of the movies I'm most proud of. The movie never hit an audience for a lot of reasons. In the test screenings it scored in the high nineties. They just couldn't figure out how to sell it.

It is especially widescreen. We shot it in anamorphic. Joe Roth was the producer, Roger Birnbaum. Artistically it was great. Bob Rodat, another Academy Award winner, wrote the screenplay.

It was about American iconography, a movie for kids. It's a movie worth seeing, or worth trying to see, I guess today. It's available here [in the US] on Amazon, I think, but, I don't really check. [laughs]

But it's a movie I'm extremely proud of and a very epic western. I always say to people: if I can just make westerns for the rest of my life, I'll be very happy. It's just a great form. It's a wonderful form to work with.

They just give us a western now as a treat about every five years, don't they?

Yeah. Yeah. Because they say they don't travel!

Can we turn to The Avengers? It sounds, certainly from where I'm sitting, like an incredibly unpleasant project to go through?

You know, both yes and no.

Again, the development of the script was quite fun, and it certainly engaged Diana Rigg. And casting was also kind of interesting, because originally it was supposed to be Nicole Kidman and Ralph [Fiennes]. But she was on Eyes Wide Shut. And I had known Ralph for a long time before this movie, and I had known Nicole for a long time.

Our wonderful producer, Jerry Weintraub, one of the greatest producers ever, we had a good time developing it, and we went off and ensconced ourselves in London for what turned out to be a couple of years. And what happened was that Kubrick would not give Nicole a start date. I initially asked Warner Bros if we could wait a year, and they said, "We really need this movie. We really want this movie."

Warners, at the time, was in great turbulence. Remember, this would be my third picture for them, and had a deal there. I'd been there a long time. But there was turbulence in the executive suites. And Terry and Bob, who were running the company, they really loved the script. I loved it. I wanted to do it, obviously. Artistically, it was a great opportunity. I really wanted to respect the iconic, ironic weird sensitivity which is so much of what The Avengers is.

I felt the script really achieved it, but the process moving forward was complicated. Because I had to find an actress. Warners wanted me to go with Uma [Thurman]. I met Uma, she was perfectly nice and charming and talented. But, ultimately, her chemistry with Ralph was not there, I felt, at the end of the day.

Did you feel that from the start of shooting?

I felt there was something amiss. But you can't focus on it, because you can't let it inform your directing. But that really didn't affect the shoot.

I cast Sean Connery, and that was a lot of fun to do. The studio said, "We're never going to make a deal with him." Anyway, I did send it to Sean. And I just got that call one day at home. [does really very good Sean Connery accent] "Sean here! I read your script and I find it rather engaging."

Of course, you have to get over the shock of that voice on the phone, and I went and I met him and I was in his face a lot. And he had a wicked reputation, too, for chewing out directors, so I was casting him. I wasn't coming on to him to see if I could do the movie. I wanted to know could I deal with this.

He was great. He loved the shoot. We had, and I say this with absolutely no bullshit, it was one of the most joyful shoots ever. We had so much fun. Sean was brilliant. He was so fun, engaged. We would go out, drink at night. We would just have a lot of fun.

The problem began as we got towards the end of the movie, with what happened at Warners. And I'm not going to blame anybody for the fact that it didn't turn out the way it should, because, ultimately, I'm responsible. But what happened was that there were two executives, one wanted to make it, and one never wanted to make it.

And over the course of shooting the movie, he had been promoted to co-head of production. And as we got close to the end, the executive whose film it was, who was really behind the making of it, was fired. And the person who was against the movie to begin with became the head of production.

It began a cascade of disasters for me, because I knew then that the studio, by the time I got to the cutting room, politically it was not very supportive. The head of the studio really didn't want it to succeed, I felt, because it wasn't his film.

And so, I cut it, and I made a cut that I really did love.

Michael Kamen did a stunning score. It was a dark score, it was a much more complicated movie.

It was 20 minutes longer. All of the absurdity of it was connected in its own logic. You could understand it.

But by the time the studio was done with it, they had cut out all the internal logic, and it was chaotic and absurd, I thought.

Then the problem became that they tested in front of a Mexican audience in Phoenix, who all complained that the movie was too English. And it went on and on and on.

So, whether or not the movie would have been good or not, I'll leave to whoever. But the movie that was finally released was not the movie that I made, and the problem finally is that you're in too deep, and you're the one who is going to wear it. So, wear it I did.

So, post-production was very, very difficult, but the production itself was a joy.

The failure of that movie changed my life. This movie was not a job for me. This movie was something that I was very, very passionate about. I gave it all.

If you look at the movie without the sound, oddly enough, you'll see the visual sensibility of it, that is really rock solid. And if you look at the credits, you'll see who I'm working with. Some of the UK's finest, finest editors, cameramen, art directors, everything. An amazing experience. And so, it really broke my heart.

I thought, "I don't know if I want to direct any more." I really questioned my own worth, or if my instincts were so wrong. I couldn't manage the politics, because, ultimately, that's me. And I had no place in the movie industry.

So, I decided I would only direct when my physical body needed me to direct badly. When it was a compulsion again.

So, for a couple of years, I just took off, travelled all corners of the earth. Just living, y'know? And I had an extreme kind of experiences all over the world, warzones and the like.

Out of that I started to write some screenplays. Some for myself, and some just for Hollywood. And all of them were either commissioned or optioned by studios. And over the course of this, I decided that the development process in films had become so slow, not just for me, but for so many of my colleagues, that what took a year or two to develop was now taking five years or longer.

Unless you're wealthy or patient, or all the things I'm not, I like to work. Almost in conjunction with that I was offered a movie for FX about nuclear terror, called Meltdown, and initially I turned it down. I've never really done TV.

In that process, it was a very dramatic piece and very dark. They gave me 21 days to shoot it. I started to look at the TV work of Paul Greengrass, of whom I'm a big fan. His early work in television is phenomenal. And Winterbottom. Those guys. I'm such a formalist, I thought, "I'm just going to let it go. I'm going to work totally on instinct." It turned out to be one of the best experiences of my film making life.

I had total freedom. I brought the writers in and edited the way I wanted. And then, within six months, it was on the air. It was successful, critically, too, and I thought, "This is a whole other world. I don't know this world." And I started to get very serious about television.

Coincidentally, of course, cable had been getting better and better in terms of attracting writers and interesting directors and writers, so the quality of work became more and more like what I would consider 70s filmmaking. And I thought a lot of it, instead of making these big genre movies - I was never attracted to doing straight-up genre movies at the time - I was always attracted to mixing it up in style. And here it is in television.

I could be doing a show like The Beast, very dark and brutal, and then turn around and do Chuck the next week. That makes me very, very happy. I've just fallen in love with TV.

Film itself, unless you are making big spectacles or super-broad comedies, it's a much longer process to get working. Whereas, I work every day.

I've got three or four smaller movies [in the works], and that's good. They chug along as they do, and every three or months I get a call from a producer saying, "We're going to go this summer. All the money's there!" And you go, "Great, great, great." Then you hear, "Oh, no. I think it's the fall". And I just keep working. Those movies will happen on their own clock.

Now I'm interested in the exploration of a medium, where, if you have two million people watching your shot, you can do interesting things. You don't live or die on one Friday night.

The other thing about television at the moment as well, you're working on some really great high profile shows at a point where the equipment people are viewing it on is lending itself to far more cinematic approaches. Presumably, that's part of the fun?

Yes. Television has become more cinematic. And sadly, a lot of cinema has become like television. I saw this wonderful movie, An Education. It's a gorgeous movie. Beautifully directed. Incredibly acted. Is it a large screen experience any more? Well, yes. It's always better to see this on the big screen. But would it have worked on a nice sized TV? Yes.

I'm not going to launch Avatar on my iPod!

I think movies are going to be evolving more and more towards spectacle, and the human interest stories are going to end up on television. The Iannucci show, The Thick Of It, which hasn't really played here. We see In The Loop, right, but The Thick Of It, in many ways, is even strong, because it doesn't end.

It makes it so much, for me, a more powerful medium. And all power to him, a brilliant director.

You mentioned In The Loop, one of my favourite films of recent years. But as you say, its weakness was that it had to have an ending.

Films are about endings, and television shows are about beginnings and setups.

I have to ask you about Chuck, which you've directed many episodes of. For me, at its best, it's the epitome of everything that's going right with television. You talked about the cinematics, and one episode you directed had a big effects shot of a missile heading towards a crowded city.

Yeah, yeah. The cinematics, the approach of Chuck - we do always say, "How do we make this movie every week?"

Chuck may be in many ways somewhat emblematic of getting wider when you have to, and getting more tableau.

It used to be television, because of the size of the screens and fuzzy lines, they said it was a medium of close-ups. But as technology gets better, there's more detail in the wider shots, and we're more able to approach more cinematic style.

You'll see that over the next few years more and more. Character is the most important thing, but you can contextualise it with wider stuff. We try to do that with Chuck quite a lot.

You've written in the past that with television, you list every shot that you're preparing for, but you never look at it while shooting. Does that hold true?

Yeah, it's true.

Presumably, that ties back to how instinctive television is. Yet, you're still bringing a movie-level of preparation to it?

I do, yes. When I pin a script down, I want to know - it's mainly because of my main fear that one day I'll wake up with no idea how to direct anything - and to be able to go to the set and follow my own guidelines. But it never seems to happen, because when I'm in it, things change, and they're very organic in TV. The overall rhythm and coverage is the same, but there are some adjustments.

The process of preparing a show is just to deeply understand what the rhythm and purpose of every scene is.

But then happy accidents happen. Ryan, the actor who plays Awesome in Chuck, is an extraordinarily funny actor. He's just really funny. He's hidden behind this matinee idol veneer, and sometimes he's in these scenes with this blank look, and you play a little longer than you should do, and it's very funny.

I went back and rewatched one of your episodes, and you managed to get references in there to Predator, Knight Rider, The Right Stuff. I think The Untouchables was in there. Apocalypse Now - "I love the smell of Burbank in the morning."

I'm glad you notice all these. [laughs]

Is a lot of that on set, when you're just sitting there thinking, "We can just put another one in?" I presume there's a chunk of it in the script?

On Chuck, there were days, especially when we're in the Buy More, because it's lunacy. On the Predator one with Tony Hales, one of the funniest humans ever, we just take it as far as we can go. Any opportunity, we jump on. It's a very safe and fun place to be.

Are the intersect sequences as intricate and complicated as they appear to us?

Yeah. A lot of them are done - we shoot some stuff, we do it in post.

Just the amount of still images you put in them. I saw your Flickr pages, where you demonstrate some of the background photography that you do. But it strikes me as an insane amount of time to put together from here.

It's just fun! Working on Chuck is really fun. Putting in the time is like, "Let's just play!" It's such a good team there. Everyone is so committed and talented. It's such a fun show to be on!

Jeremiah Chechnik, thank you very much!

See Also:

• Jeremiah Chechik interview part 1
  

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There is a moment in an early episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm where Larry David, playing himself, asks Julia Louis-Dreyfus, also playing herself, to star in his new sitcom, loosely based around "The Seinfeld Curse", the notion that none of the four stars of Seinfeld (including Louis-Dreyfus, who played Elaine) were able to achieve similar successes in any of their subsequent shows. "Can we do it on HBO?" Louis-Dreyfus asks him. "I want to be able to say 'fuck'!" Curb Your Enthusiasm, of course, is one of HBO's flagship comedy shows.

It's a joke that's so uncompromisingly metatextual that it would require a Wire-esque noteboard and wallchart to fully unpack and explain it to the uninitiated. But its clever mixture of the postmodern and the profane is a good distillation of the approach HBO has taken towards its original programming over the last decade, an approach that has inarguably changed the landscape of television.

It seems unlikely that the recent launch of Sky Atlantic will instigate a similar sea change in British TV, but its arrival is a hugely significant event nonetheless. If nothing else, it highlights the contrasting attitudes of the two pay TV giants towards its programming.

Originally launched in 1972 as a paid subscription service in New York that was brought to people's homes via a system of underground cabling, HBO became the first national satellite broadcaster in 1975, when it broadcast the legendary 'Thrilla in Manila' boxing match between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier.

Like BSkyB, HBO's early unique selling point was its exclusive broadcasts of live sporting events and first runs of blockbuster movies, which made up the entirety of the channel's early output and still features heavily today.

The birth of HBO as the cultural touchstone that it has now become for the television industry came in 1995, with the appointment of Chris Albrecht as the president of HBO Original Programming. Previously, Albrecht had been head of HBO Independent Productions, and had overseen the production of the immensely popular sitcom, Everybody Loves Raymond for CBS, as well as comedy programming for the HBO network itself.

One thing that shouldn't be overlooked in the history of HBO is how consistently great its comedy output has been. Alongside dozens of great stand-up specials, HBO also produced two of the best and most influential comedy shows of the past 25 years in Mr Show With Bob And David and The Larry Sanders Show.

HBO's first dramatic hour-long programme arrived in 1997 in the form of Oz, a queasily brutal prison drama that became notorious for its scenes of violence, sexual and otherwise. The very existence of Oz demonstrated one of HBO's unique selling points, both to audiences and to programme makers.

As the network was a pay-to-subscribe service that, crucially, ran without adverts, it was exempt from the same strict indecency and obscenity guidelines that governed network television. As a result, the network could get away with showing pretty much anything, which opened up a whole range of potential storytelling opportunities that were previously off-limits. Oz was a show that it would have been literally impossible to make on any other channel, which made HBO immediately attractive to creatives. As Louis-Dreyfus memorably put it, you get to say 'fuck'!

It was also around this time that HBO adopted the ingenious marketing slogan "It's Not TV. It's HBO," which memorably summarised the quiet TV revolution being undergone at HBO in just five words, and remained the network's slogan for the next decade.

On broadcast, Oz was met with decent critical acclaim, along with Sex And The City on its debut a year later. The turning point for HBO, however, came in 1999 with the premiere of mob drama, The Sopranos.

Created by the brilliant, yet at the time unknown television writer, David Chase, The Sopranos brought a mafia story to the small screen for the first time, and in doing so introduced us to one of the greatest characters of all time in Tony Soprano.

Funny, violent, introspective, frustrating and exhilarating, the impact of The Sopranos on television was seismic. Firstly, it completely bowled over the critics, who were now faced with a television programme that merited the kind of analysis and discussion normally reserved for the best independent and arthouse cinema.

Renowned film historian, David Thomson, even went so far as to include The Sopranos in the book, 1001 Films You Must See Before You Die, the only television show to make the list.

Secondly, it was eventually an enormous commercial hit, single-handedly bringing in subscribers to HBO, who wanted to see what the fuss was all about.

The most important thing about The Sopranos, however, is how uncompromising it was in its vision. Even as the show's popularity reached unprecedented high levels for a cable show, showrunner Chase refused to make The Sopranos all about the violent whackings and 'mob stuff'. As a matter of fact, Chase deliberately made the show more obtuse and weird as it went along, even hinting that he was trying to  deliberately shake off some of the more impatient and bloodthirsty sections of his audience.

Importantly, and pretty staggeringly, Chase was given complete freedom to do so. Albrecht and HBO realised, with the success of The Sopranos, that there was an untapped audience for so-called 'quality' TV, and what it paved the way for more than anything else, was writers and creative people in television being given complete artistic freedom without interference from the network. Not just because they were freed from censorship constraints, but also in the sense that they were now allowed to tell the stories they wanted to tell, at the pace they wanted to tell them, and the network would trust implicitly in their creative stewardship.

This resulted in a lot of personal, singular visions being brought to the screen by HBO in the early 2000s, as they took The Sopranos template and ran with. 

Alan Ball's blackly comic, death-obsessed drama, Six Feet Under, Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks' epic World War II miniseries, Band Of Brothers, Daniel Knauf's bizarre mystery-horror Carnivale, David Milch's profanely lyrical Western series, Deadwood, and David Simon's Dickensian portrait of modern Baltimore in The Wire.

All of these shows met with, at the least, great critical acclaim. The Wire, in particular, has a genuine claim to being the critical consensus pick for greatest television show of all time, with varying degrees of commercial success. The viewing figures almost didn't matter, however. HBO got the reputation as the TV station where something genuinely new and exciting was happening, and all of the best creative talent in television wanted to work there. HBO became the byword for quality in television circles.

However, in recent years, HBO's position at the top of the 'quality' TV heap has come under serious threat. Rival cable channel AMC launched its own original programming roster in 2007 with the formidable Mad Men, then followed this up with the magnificent Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead.

Similarly, FX has enjoyed a creative purple patch with the hugely acclaimed final seasons of cop drama, The Shield, biker drama Sons Of Anarchy, boxing thriller, Lights Out and Elmore Leonard-inspired crime series, Justified. Long-time competitor, Showtime, is scoring hits, too, with its multi-award-winning Dexter.

The HBO effect has even filtered down into network shows, with shows such as Lost, Friday Night Lights and Fringe all adopting the high production values and dense storytelling of HBO's output. These are the shows that have caught the imagination of television critics, in particular, over the past few years, whereas HBO has struggled to replicate the impeccable form it enjoyed in the early 2000s. It's not done yet, however, having heavily invested in two huge projects in Boardwalk Empire and Game Of Thrones.

Which brings us back to Sky Atlantic. Sky are promoting Boardwalk Empire very heavily in their marketing materials and showed the 90 minute pilot no less than three times on its opening night. I've seen the entirety of Boardwalk Empire (my review archive can be found here) and make no mistake. It's an excellent TV show, and one that I would recommend watching without hesitation.

However, as a show, it probably sums up best exactly why the arrival of Sky Atlantic isn't the cause for celebration that many fans of 'quality' TV have made it out to be.

Unlike HBO's best shows, Boardwalk Empire doesn't  offer you, the viewer, anything that you haven't already seen before, which is not something you can say about The Wire, or Carnivale, or even Breaking Bad.

The storyline of a compulsively mendacious, yet charming main character is one that has been done to death in other shows, and similarly the gangster setting is one that has come to be mined ruthlessly. (The showrunner of Boardwalk Empire is a former writer for The Sopranos, and there is a significant overlap in tone and content.)

It is impeccably made and very entertaining, with insanely high production values, but there is the lingering sense that it is a show that is standing on the shoulders of giants.

This is an accusation that is often levelled at Sky. They entice viewers by buying up products that are already extremely popular (be it films, television programmes, or sport) and then sell them back to that same audience at a premium rate.

While this is maybe a slightly reductive way of looking at things, it's not very far removed from the truth at all.

However, the timing of Sky's executives is traditionally poor. The trouble with waiting to see if a show is popular before purchasing it is that you invariably end up acquiring it after its cultural tipping point and just as it is starting to begin its decline.

This was certainly the case with programmes such as 24, and it could even be argued that Friends and Lost were both past their best days when Sky got hold of them. (I'd disagree, but the viewing figures don't lie.)

While it's too early to write them off yet, it could be similarly argued that the glory days of HBO are long gone, and Sky have once again arrived too late to the party.

Sky have the money to invest the way HBO did.  Admittedly, they have the irritation of advertisers to deal with, but as the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 have demonstrated, advertisers in the UK have a much bigger tolerance for challenging material and less influence over a show's actual content. But Sky's dramatic output has been limp, at best, with only a couple of weak Discworld adaptations and trashy soaps like Dream Team and Mile High making any waves with viewers at all in its 25 year history (although the recent Thorne shows promise).

It's an indictment of Sky's own reluctance to gamble on creativity that the launch of a channel that exclusively comprises American imports is the most interesting and hotly anticipated thing they have done in the field of television drama for years, possibly ever.

It's easy to see why Sky bought the HBO back catalogue. It's probably the finest library of television ever produced, and if there are any HBO shows you haven't already seen, then the arrival Sky Atlantic is a very good thing. 

However, it's a sad irony that a subscription channel that built its empire on originality has now had its entire output bought, remarketed and resold to another market as the next big thing in television.

Welcome to Sky Atlantic, then. No original content, and reliant exclusively on popular, expensively acquired imports and the willingness of our American cousins to take a chance. It's not TV. But it's not HBO either.

Follow Paul Martinovic on Twitter @paulmartinovic. Click here for his archive of Boardwalk Empire reviews, or for more babble check out his blog here.

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It's hardly going out on a limb to suggest that, when the schedules are so full of big movie releases, there are going to be casualties. I first remember thinking this back in 1997, when the release roster featured a summer chockfull of titles such as The Lost World: Jurassic Park, Men In Black, Air Force One, Con Air, Contact, Conspiracy Theory, Speed 2, Batman & Robin, Volcano and Starship Troopers.

And casualties there were that year. Starship Troopers was shunted to the end of the year and struggled to find an initial audience. Volcano was hurt by the arrival of Dante's Peak earlier in the year, and wasn't aided by being a bit shit. Speed 2 and Batman & Robin faltered for a couple of (obvious) reasons, while Conspiracy Theory, a potentially interesting film, never really stood a chance.

Casualties in the summer season are nothing fresh, of course. But Hollywood is increasingly playing a high stakes game in the way that it's scheduling very expensive movies. 2011 looks packed enough, with a summer season of major films that we can't all possibly get to see. 2012? It might just be the peak of the blockbuster.

Let's just go through what we've got coming, and the fun starts as early as March, surely now the new official kick-off time for summer blockbuster season. For, in that month alone, Disney will be launching its big-budget family flick, John Carter Of Mars, while Warner Bros will be hoping lightning strikes back with Clash Of The Titans 2. Universal's The Lorax, an animated adaptation of a Dr Seuss story, has big hit written all over it, too.

But it's the summer proper, from May onwards, when already the schedule is looking rammed. In May alone, we're definitely getting Marvel's The Avengers, Universal's big budget board game tie-in, Battleship, DreamWorks' Madagascar 3, Sony's Men In Black 3, and, er, Sacha Baron Cohen's Saddam Hussein book-based comedy, The Dictator.

June? Ridley Scott's Prometheus (once known as the Alien prequel), Pixar's Brave, the big-budget Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, and the Star Trek sequel. Wise money suggests that Fox will place The Wolverine in June, too. But already, from May onwards, it's a blockbuster every single week.

And it doesn't really let up in July. The Spider-Man reboot, Ice Age 4 and The Dark Knight Rises each stand a chance at cracking a billion dollars apiece on past form. Which leaves The Bourne Legacy tentatively planned for an early August release.

But there's more, in summer alone. Die Hard 5 is expected in summer 2012, as is The Expendables 2. Neither of those has a fixed release date yet. Disney hasn't placed King Of The Elves. Universal hasn't confirmed where it'll put Stretch Armstrong. And there's also the comedies, which traditionally come up with their release dates closer to the time.

Don't forget too that a last-minute blockbuster generally gets added a year before, such as Predators, or X-Men: First Class.

Bluntly, there are going to be casualties.

Perhaps what's even more staggering is what's happening at the end of the year. The Christmas season has long been the secondary release window for blockbusters, but generally, we've had a couple of family pictures and possibly a Bond movie. In 2012? We get a lot more than that.

Firstly, there is a Bond movie, as the twenty-third 007 adventure is set for November 9th (the same day as Universal's Ouija). But just a week before that, Disney is planning to roll out Monsters, Inc 2. Pixar hasn't released a film outside of the summer for many years, yet, in 2012, it's releasing two movies. Hence, Christmas 2012 it is for the return of Sully and he's only got a week or two before DreamWorks Animation rolls out Rise Of The Guardians.

November also sees the finale of the Twilight saga, with The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 2. And in December, we can expect the first of the two movies of The Hobbit, as well as the intriguing-sounding Snow White And The Huntsman.

What's set to throw an extra rocket into the end of year schedules, though, is the two blockbusters yet to be given a release date. The second Tintin movie is the first, and that alone should make a few quid. But we also have the return of Superman, which follows Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol in 2011 by putting an obvious summer blockbuster in the middle of winter.

There are reasons why Warner Bros needs Superman to hit that release slot, but even so, it's hard to shake the feeling that there's too many movies in the summer to slot something like Superman in.

All we've really looked at here are the big-budget movies, but there are plenty of medium-budget flicks fighting for attention, who may just be the victim of the blockbuster overload.

Unless some savvy counter-programming or marketing can be deployed, it's going to be harder and harder for some films to get noticed in blockbuster season. And by necessity of the number of big films in the market, blockbuster season is now eating up at least half of the year in one form or another.

I can't help but feel, then, that 2012 might see a bit of a peak, and I wouldn't be surprised to see a few movies get pushed back to give themselves room. What chance, as things stand, does a grown-up sci-fi flick like Prometheus stand, for instance? It's a hard sell at the best of times, without a bunch of superheroes around the corner.

Also, I wonder if 2012 will see the peak of Marvel's box office powers. It's hard to find too many places it can go post-The Avengers, although maybe that's a chat for another time.

For now, while I look forward to some of the cinematic treats upcoming in 2012, I can't help thinking that in some way, we might just all be paying for them later. Big-budget flops, after all, tend to see studios taking fewer risks. And given that it's arguably that approach that's seen us get to the 2012 overload anyway, that might just make blockbuster cinema a little less interesting for a while.

Mind you, the world may just end in 2012, making all of the above moot. Ho hum.

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The past! It may have happened ages ago, but we still know a lot about it. Like who won what war, who lost what war, how many wars there have been, how monkeys learnt to use tools because of a giant black obelisk thing. That's all fact. Videogames hate facts, though - facts are stupid and useless, and get in the way of awesome stories about men struggling against demons and hitting things with big weapons.

Here are a few videogames that refuse to be swayed by annoying things like truth or subtlety, and instead ploughed their own, way more awesome furrows. Hey, if it's good enough for Hollywood, it's good enough for them there vidya games. Awesome.

Assassin's Creed

Well, aside from the whole Assassins versus Templars, garden of Eden, hidden history of the world, the Illuminati, and a massive global conspiracy, Assassin's Creed gets a lot of things right. Ha! That was a joke.

Why, in the past, present or future, would people put wanted posters half way up ninety foot sheer walls that only mentalists would try and scale?

Why would knights stand about on rooftops waiting for someone to come along and pick a fight with them? Why would a simple, terrifyingly moon faced boy want enormous feathers? Flags? Don't get me started on the flags.

As a final point, it should be noted that never in the history of the human race has sitting on a bench been a legitimate way of losing the attention of murderous guards. That is all.

Dante's Inferno

Pointing out historical inaccuracies in Dante's Inferno is like shooting fish in a barrel so full of fish that if you wave a gun in its general direction, you will definitely shoot a fish. Far be it from me to point out the obvious, but Dante Alighieri was a poet and a scholar, he was not a muscle bound, self-harming, lunatic crusader with a huge scythe and a kinda sexy ghost wife.

Dante was a politician, not a sweaty, hallucinating murderer with a guilty conscience after his wrongdoings in the crusades. Crusades that had ended some twenty years before The Divine Comedy, the work on which the game is “based” was written. Also, everything about the game is stupid, but that's more of a personal opinion than a problem with the chronology of the events.

Timesplitters

Where to start? The Timesplitters series doesn't just ignore historical fact, it shoots it square between the eyes with a terrifying laser cannon beam thing. Don't get me wrong, the Timesplitters games are the perfect example of a console FPS done well, and it's a tragedy that the fourth might never see the light of day, but their concept of truth is about as precise as their understanding of primate behaviour.

There was no hunchback in Notre Dame cathedral, there were no zombie mummies in Egyptian tombs, and people in the 1970s didn't all have amazing moustaches. It's also highly likely that nobody in the history of anything has ever been called Kitten Celeste. And don't come after me with your “they're changing history” nonsense, I'm sick of people using altered chronology as an excuse.

Wolfenstein

How I wish it were true. Whilst the Nazis did have a strange interest in the occult, at no point during World War 2 did they create a robot housing for Hitler, enabling him to stomp around and fire glowing balls of death in the direction of any American GI who should stumble upon his diabolical plans.

The 2001 sequel takes things even further, resurrecting evil Saxon princes and other such spectacular nonsense that's difficult not to enjoy.

After that, it's all special medallions, extra dimensions and difficult to pronounce crystals.

The problem is, popular culture is in danger of turning the Nazis into zombie bothering cartoon villains, and that's a dangerous road to be heading down. Maybe it's time to find someone else to come up with plans to destroy the Earth with undead minions and beams that shoot out of ancient deity's behind parts.

Prince Of Persia

The original, 2D incarnations of POP can probably be left out of this list, mainly because any inaccuracies they peddle are dwarfed by the monumental liberties taken by Ubisoft's free running reboot.

For example, a Persian prince using a style of athletic and acrobatic movement, created in modern France, some 2300 years prior to its invention. is a tad anachronistic. Not as bad as his American drawl though, or the undeniable fact that whilst we've discovered much about ancient Persia, we've never found immense towers that stretch into the sky, designed so only a spry and fearless athlete can reach the top by jumping onto platforms, beams, ropes and other helpful handholds.

Dynasty Warriors

Where to begin? I think what riles me most about the Dynasty Warriors series, gameplay aside, is the frankly ridiculous way that more often than not, the minions you're button mashing to death simply mill around waiting to die. I've never been involved in a war in three kingdoms era China, but I'm pretty sure that if I were, I'd at least try and jab the ostentatiously dressed man trying to kill me with a magical sword.

It might get the names right, but other than that, Dynasty Warriors rewrites Chinese history with every play through. Also, archaeological evidence is yet to prove that enormous snow tigers ever existed, let alone that they existed in China 1800 years ago.

“Stop being churlish,” you may yell, “what matters about a videogame is that it's fun!” True, but the Dynasty Warriors series is a repugnant pile of arse.

Pretty Much Every Real World Set FPS

Oh, look at me, using a gun that hasn't been invented yet. Oh, look at me, having my health fully restored by an injection/box of bandages, despite the fact I'm so riddled with bullets that if I even look at a metal detector it would explode. Oh, look at me, respawning after I've been sent splattering across some foreign field by heavy artillery fire. Oh, look at me, talking with a generic American accent, even though there were no Americans involved in this assault.

The list goes on and on and on, but I really don't have time to write it. Suffice to say, shame on you, pretty much every real world set FPS. Read a book once in a while and maybe, just maybe, we can inject a sliver of authenticity into games that recreate the not-at-all-too-distant past.

The same goes for the not-at-all-too distant future, but we'll save that for a different list.

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That a Mario game should be coming out on a Nintendo console isn’t much of a surprise, of course - at least one platform adventure starring the Italian plumber has appeared on every system since the NES.

What we now know, however, is that Mario is set to appear in at least four titles on the 3DS. Paper Mario is one game we’ve long known about, and the trailers look great. Mushroom-filled racer Mario Kart is another. We know from first-hand experience that the handheld’s 3D graphics make the game look more like a tiny, pastel-coloured Scalextric set than ever. Sadly, it was a rolling demo, so we were unable to play it.

Back in November, Nintendo’s creative genius Shigeru Miyamoto revealed that a 3D game was in the works for the console, with gameplay along the lines of Mario 64, as well as a 2D game that harked back to the portly plumber’s classic outings on the NES an SNES.

Miyamoto has now announced, via an interview on the Wii’s official US site, that a Super Mario Bros game will be made for the 3DS.

“So, in the interests of adopting new technology for the Super Mario Bros. tradition, I am now making a new Super Mario Bros game for the Nintendo 3DS system,” Miyamoto said. “I want to show everyone as soon as possible what the new Super Mario Bros. will be like on the Nintendo 3DS.”

While we’re excited enough about a 3D Mario game - a miniature version of Super Mario Galaxy would be great, Nintendo - a 21st century version of the classic Super Mario Bros would be equally fantastic. As the recent 25th anniversary reissue reminded us, the game’s still a genre-defining piece of videogame perfection, even a quarter of a century later.

Miyamoto’s words suggest to us that his new Super Mario Bros game will be a proper new entry in the series, and not the NES version with tacked-on 3D support, which makes us very, very happy indeed.

According to Nintendo Life, Miyamoto may be formally unveiling Super Mario Bros 3DS at this year’s E3 in Los Angeles this June. We’ll keep you posted.

Nintendo Life

I'll make no secret of my admiration for Fumito Ueda's out-and-out classic PlayStation 2 videogame, Ico. Released in 2001, its surreal, spooky atmosphere made it a slow seller, and the game was a slow seller as a consequence.

Nevertheless, the legend of Ico's greatness - its challenging, environmental puzzles, extraordinary castle setting and touching central relationship - gradually spread, and within a couple of years, copies of the game were exchanging hands for extraordinary sums of money.

Regularly discussed and cited as a work of brilliance even a decade later, Ico has continued to endure, while videogames that sold several times as many copies have long since faded from memory. And with both Ico and its spiritual successor, Shadow Of The Colossus, being released in a new HD edition to tie in with Ueda's forthcoming game, The Last Guardian, interest in this ethereal adventure is as high as ever.

We've also learned that popular Japanese author, Miyuki Miyabe, has penned a novel based on Ico's premise. The book's been available in Japan for four years (which, I'm ashamed to say, was news to me), yet has only now received an English translation courtesy of Viz Novels.

While its story isn't a carbon copy of the game's events, it takes inspiration from the atmospheric setting and characters Ueda conjured up ten years ago.

Tie-in novels based on videogames aren't exactly unknown, of course. We've seen several Halo and Mass Effect novels in recent years, for example, while literary heavyweight Martin Amis expressed his love for Taito's seminal shooter in the now quite rare 1982 non-fiction book, Invasion Of The Space Invaders.

We're intrigued to see just how well Miyabe has captured the unforgettable mood and tone of Ico's soaring architecture. The delicate, ethereal story at its centre, of a small boy with horns and his relationship with a ghostly young girl called Yorda, may be gossamer thin, but the world of Ico is one we're happy to revisit, whether it's on the small screen or in the pages of a novel.

Miyabe's Ico novel is due for release this summer.

Kotaku

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James Cameron's been talking about adapting the classic manga/anime Battle Angel Alita for years now, but following the success of that film with blue aliens in it, it had begun to look like such a project had withered on the vine. And with the director tied into making two more blue alien movies over the next five years or so, the prospect of a Battle Angel movie was looking even less likely.

According to Collider, however, it's just possible that a Battle Angel adaptation may appear one day, after all. On the campaign trail for cave-bound thriller, Sanctum, Cameron indicated that he still had a great deal of enthusiasm for Battle Angel, even though any work on its adaptation would have to wait for several years.

"I'm obviously going to be pretty busy for the next five years," Cameron said. "And so I had to consider, do I hand this project off to another director? And then I thought, ‘No, I love it too much.'...It's such a rich world. What I'm going to do is take the spine story and use elements from the first four books. So, the Motorball from books three and four, and parts of the story of one and two will all be in the movie."

Two years ago, Cameron indicated that the Battle Angel script and much of its production design had already been put in place, so there's an outside chance that, once Cameron's finished his duties on the distant planet of Pandora, his own take on the Japanese manga could be his next piece of work.

Created in 1990 by Yukito Kishiro, Battle Angel Alita (or Gunnm, as it's known in Japan) weaves a futuristic tale of a female cyborg and her friendship with the scientist who finds and repairs her. As her shrouded memory gradually returns, Alita works first as a mercenary, hunting down and destroying criminal cyborgs, and later becomes embroiled in the deadly gladiatorial game of Motorball mentioned by Cameron in his interview.

While some may be sceptical that a manga like Battle Angel could work as a live-action film, particularly in the hands of a western director, the themes and style of the premise are perfect for Cameron's technical style of filmmaking, and we've high hopes that his treatment of the story will be a watchable one.

Collider

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