The Shameless Plug: 10 Things I Love About You

0:14Hello pod, I'm James Dyer and welcome to The Shameless Plug in which I don't usually sit down with Empire's Nick de Semlyen to chat about what's inside the latest issue of Empire, but Chris is of course off on his cruise at the moment. And if you're wondering what that looks like, maybe take a look at 1998 Treat Williams' film, Deep Rising. And that should give you a decent idea of what's going on over there. But in Chris's absence, it falls to me to pour over the pages of Empire, the world's greatest film magazine. But we are going to mix up the schedule a little bit here. We are not going to go through the magazine page by page.

0:46Instead, Nick, instead, you are going to fascinate and entertain with a list of your top 10 things inside this issue. It's going to be suspense because I have no idea what is on this list. None. I wonder how many of them you wrote. All of them, because they are all going to be my breakdown of the Dune Part 3 trailer.

1:03Nick de Semlyen:Oh, yeah, you did do that. You did do that. I was going to say you didn't write anything in this issue. Sadly, that hasn't made the cut. But next month, for sure, something that you've done will be sitting at number one. Well, thank you. Because you've done something pretty cool. Not to be too cryptic, but you have lived out your ultimate fantasy for our next issue. Yes. Not as tawdry as that made it sound. No, it's not quite as sex-oriented as it sounds. a very wholesome fantasy but it's very exciting uh you will find out or will be revealed very soon um but yes you've heard of the hateful eight this is the shameless 10 um in which i am going to you know not go through every single page of the issue as we usually do because i wonder if that might get a little bit tedious for listeners let us know um maybe you'd like that but instead we're going to pick uh or i'm going to pick 10 things that i really love inside this issue and we can chat them.

1:52Nick de Semlyen:And then, if you haven't already got the issue, hopefully you can go and seek it out and, yeah, let us know what you make of it. Available as it is in all good and evil newsagents. Indeed. So we're told. So this is 10 things I love about the issue. Yes. Well, we're going to start with the obvious one. The guy on the cover. Somebody called Steven Spielberg? The man with the beard. The guy with the beard. Who, you know, he has been on the cover of Empire before, but a very long time ago. Do you remember which film that was for? Minority Report It was, yeah, 2002 with Tom Cruise, with the cruiser the two of them are on but it's very rare that we have a director on the cover we almost never do but we decided to do it this month because hey, it's Steven Spielberg and you know, another factor in it was that his new film Disclosure Day is deeply classified it's, you know, every so often we cover a film that is so top secret that we don't know the people working on the film don't even seem to know it's all very encrypted and secret.

2:52Nick de Semlyen:So, yeah, we thought this would be a good opportunity to go big on the man himself. Do you have a favourite Spielberg memory of doing stuff with Uncle Steve? Uncle Stephen. Yes, we have a long history with Uncle Stephen, has to be said. My favourite memory will, of course, revolve around our 20th birthday issue that we did, Chex Notes, many, many years ago. 2009. That was now 17 years ago. Yes, when we decamped. The office basically decamped to a little B &B called The Farmer's Daughter by The Grove in LA. And we all did various things for the issue. We did that big photo shoot, didn't we, where we reenacted scenes from films.

3:29We got like Jodie Foster, Nancy Hodkins, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Mel Gibson, other people like that. Great people. We got them to reenact scenes from their films all under the auspices of Uncle Stephen Buck. Normally, just to pull the curtain back on Empire Production a little bit, when we have issue meetings, it's just a bunch of us sitting around the table. Wondering where Chris is. Wondering where Chris is. Wondering where Chris is. Absolutely. But, you know, and sometimes they might get interrupted by Zoe from marketing. But this time, this particular meeting was interrupted by Cathy Kennedy and Janusz Kaminski because we had an issue meeting with none other than Steven Spielberg himself at his offices.

4:02And his offices were adjacent to the volume where he was shooting Tintin. So when we finished having the issue meeting where he was kind of, we were kicking over ideas for the birthday issue with him. He let us come on to the volume and he gave me the little controller and he let me steer the Tintin camera and it was really funny. He was showing me how it works and that was pretty cool. Being directed by Steven Spielberg is definitely on the bucket list. He still couldn't get a good performance out of you but

4:25Nick de Semlyen:he tried his best. Yeah, that was an amazing week and that is the one time I have crossed paths with Steven Spielberg was at the Goonies reunion that I spent many months orchestrating and we got all the Goonies back together. It was, we did the photo shoot and interview on the Tintin stage on the volume. Nice. And James Cameron swung by because he just happened to be in the area. And it was a very, very exciting day. But yeah, I got to briefly... He wasn't part of the interview. He was part of the photo shoot, but he was doing loads of other stuff for the issue. So he was off talking to Ian Freer, who we'll come back to in a minute.

5:02Nick de Semlyen:Yes. And I shook hands with him. He actually came over to Chris and I, and he was like, hi, I'm Stephen. And we're like, yes, hello. Are you? Are you really? I didn't know that. But yeah, he is an Empire legend. You know, we've been doing stuff with him for decades and we gave him the Legend of Our Lifetime Award, I think it was. We got him to come to Camden in 2018. We literally got him to Camden. To the Empire Awards. And I remember in the coverage afterwards, it was literally like the Alan Partridge episode where they're waiting for Roger Moore to arrive. Where we literally did a countdown of like, Steven Spielberg's private jet has landed in Luton and now it's going past the big Tesco.

5:39Nick de Semlyen:And we kind of tracked it all the way to the event. But it was great. And he made a very funny and brilliant speech where he said that he, on his way, he was ruminating about getting this legend award. And then he drove past a big billboard for the McDonald's chicken legend sandwich, which he said put everything in perspective. But yeah, he's our cover story for the first time since Ready Player One. And Ian Freer, who we mentioned earlier, did the interview. Now, he is our Spielberg guy. He has literally written a book on Steven Spielberg. Yes, he has. he has had many amazing encounters. He got to go around Universal with Steven Spielberg in his golf cart.

6:19Nick de Semlyen:Steven Spielberg gets a black golf cart. They're normally white on the Universal Studios lot. And he gets a black one. It's the fastest one. That's amazing. It's a souped up V8 golf cart. That's excellent. It's got nitro. Yeah, it's got a button for nitro. He showed Ian on that kind of tour of the Universal lot. He showed him the office where he broke into as a young kid. starting off in the industry. And this is my favourite thing. When Ian went on the set of War Horse, Steven Spielberg got a chair, a director's chair made for Ian with his name on the back. Really? So he could sit next to him and watch.

6:55Nick de Semlyen:So yeah, Ian's had some incredible experiences and knows Spielberg stuff better than ever. There's another good fact about the chairs. Steven Spielberg said daddy on the back of it because he's the daddy of the set. It's given me an idea for next week. for the office. Yeah, you should get one made. So, yeah, so Ian spoke to Stephen Spielberg again for this cover story. This time it was on Zoom. Fun fact, Stephen Spielberg was eating cauliflower soup. Cauliflower soup? Not sure if he was eating it during the interview, but he had some. So it's quite slurpy, a slurpy interview. Yeah, it was maybe, I'm sure he wasn't slurping.

7:30Nick de Semlyen:So, yeah, cauliflower soup was on deck, and we did a pretty amazing photo shoot in LA. Art Stryber, who has shot Stephen Spielberg for us before, did a sci-fi tinged shoot on the Universal lot with him for the cover and for the inside. And then in a separate part of the cover story, Ian talked to all the actors and David Koepp, the writer of Disclosure Day, to try and get some information out of them. To try and find out. So we should say that this is the new film. It's out on the 12th of June here in the UK. Stars Emily Blunt, Josh O 'Connor, Colin Firth, Eve Hewson, who else? Common Domingo.

8:06and from what we know from the very cryptic trailer it is about the disclosure that alien life exists and apparently likes to communicate via the medium of weather forecasts but uh you'll understand more from the trailer but the interview so as you say it's a we've got a making of feature discussing you know talking to the cast talking to everyone involved in it but we all have also have that sit down we're just ian and stephen uh and he drops i would say the most important thing that I've ever heard him say. And it is definitely the high point of the issue where he says his favourite science fiction movies are Dune and Dune Part 2.

8:41And I think, really, that says everything you need to know.

8:43Nick de Semlyen:They're his favourites of all time? Or just his favourite ones recently? I mean, they're among his favourites of all time. You might be hyping that up slightly. He name-checked them. He is a Dune head, and I respect him for that. How do you feel about the fact that he also said that he's going to get to see Dune Part 3 ahead of time, so he will see it in front of you? It's understandable, isn't it? It's like if Steven Spielberg wants to see your film, you just let him see it I think that's just a given I would like that to be true of me sadly it is not I will make a special chair for you that says June Daddy for when you watch it June Daddy so yeah I mean this movie Disclosure Day is so top secret we know it's about aliens we know Steven Spielberg's directing it we know who's in it we don't you know there isn't that much information out there the internet has gone buck wild with rumours so I don't know have you heard all these rumours there's a rumour that it's Close Encounters to the Fourth Time Close Encounters 2 there's a rumour that Steven Spielberg is working for the government and he is actually this film is actually going to reveal the reality of alien life so it's like a documentary hope that's true but there's all kinds of there's all kinds of mad ballyhoo but anyway we we kind of did the first interviews with with the cast and the only ones so far i think and um you know we even got the character names which was genuinely there was a whole big conversation about all the character names spoilers and can we run them and so you know the level of detail and it's always i don't know about you but sometimes when you're doing the first interview in the world and it's really it's something really top secret and someone will just say something and you're like is that is that a massive bit sometimes you're like the hairs on your back i remember i did the um the indiana jones five the day it wasn't even didn't have a name at that point but ended up being dial of destiny and interviewing the actors and sometimes they tell you stuff and then you get a note afterwards saying please don't reveal that That was a massive third act thing.

10:27Nick de Semlyen:But it's exciting, but also can be quite challenging covering something where you don't know anything. So you don't know if something is going to be a big plot spoiler or whether it's just, you know. What's the most top secret thing you've written about? Oh, that's difficult. You did the first Avatar. I did do the first Avatar. But the thing is, the reason why I kind of almost don't think that that was super top secret is because the scriptment that Cameron had written for that. had been online for years like that that was available so people kind of i think if they wanted to dig around i mean it changed it evolved but i think people knew the broad strokes of that film before it came out but certainly i had the first inkling of what it was going to be and as i'm sure you can imagine that was a really hard thing to articulate to people this is going you're basically going up to people saying you're going to shit yourself with your mouth wide open and they're like i don't understand what you're talking about why would i want to do that but uh so it proved so but it can it can sometimes feel like you're carrying around these classified redacted secrets and you're kind of terrified of losing your dictaphone and suddenly they've got you know all the interviews where you're interviewing someone in their office and your eyes stroll to like the the board behind them and like all of the storyboards for this top secret thing are up there and they haven't thought to hide them oh yeah yeah i remember on jurassic world fallen kingdom i i arrived for the set visit and they said i'll just go in that room and just wait um we'll pick you up and i went in the room and it was the entire film storyboarded like literally and i was like am i is it bad for me to have a look and like but it was amazing it was all the way around the walls and on the ceiling and they were just like the entire film so that was quite that was quite exciting um but yeah it's uh we're very lucky but anyway ian yeah drills into disclosure day um it's a really great read i mean i still not entirely certain i mean the entire third act of the movie has been forbidden from going into marketing and right and I like that I actually I'm here for more secret movies and then not giving away stuff in the end of the film in the trailers which happens a lot so I'm excited until we got this top secret summer blockbuster it feels very old school yeah well it also makes it feel like an event because I think nowadays marketing works so hard to give away as much as possible to get as many bums on seats but you know when it's a Steven Spielberg film I think they can rely upon him to a certain extent and he's able to shut that shit down so yeah I love that this is a this is a secret thing and I really enjoyed the interview that Ian did with him talking about his love of sci-fi, his influences, all the things that, you know, that have essentially led him to where he is now.

12:52Although there is one thing I would take issue with, Stephen. One thing. One thing only. He says, you know, the one genre he's never really touched upon is horror. He's never done a horror movie. And I put it to you that Jurassic Park is in many ways a horror movie. I would say Jaws is more of a horror than Jurassic Park. It's a very legitimate point. Yes.

13:10Nick de Semlyen:Jaws as well. Another horror film. I mean, when I was a kid and I saw Jaws, I was genuinely terrified of sharks coming out the little grills and swimming pools, which isn't logistically possible. No, that would be tricky. But yeah, I mean, arguably no film has scared more people than Jaws. Yeah, I agree with you. Don't know why I went straight to Jurassic Park there. That was like, yeah, AI, absolutely horrifying. Stephen, no. Yes, he - A dinosaur that speaks at you is terrifying. So anyway, yeah, I urge you to check it out. It's, you know, they're still secrets, but Ian gets some great little stories and information out of all of them.

13:47Nick de Semlyen:He does. And it's, like you say, it's a lovely emotional interview with Stephen, who came up with a story for Disclosure Day himself. Amazing. Which is cool. Yeah. All right. Are you ready for number two? Go on, hit me with it. All right. We're going back to the news section, edited by Beth Webb, and a story written by Jamie Graham and pitched by Jamie Graham, Stinko Vision. Yes, I saw this. I mean look it fascinates me that this is going ahead I will never ever experience it personally I find the idea of 40X too distracting but sort of scratch and sniff like poo smelling no just absolutely not under any circumstances but this is a thing that is happening so yeah the film is the upcoming Dead Lover it's a necrophiliac romcom and there are 10 funky smells that you can experience including ghost puke banana Yes.

14:36Nick de Semlyen:And kill shot. Banana is not nearly as tasty as it might initially seem. No, because apparently it's inspired by a line of dialogue. I want to pick up a piece of your poo and eat it like a banana. Yes. So this film is not based on a story by Steven Spielberg. No. But I am fascinated by the fact they are trying to bring this back. I think this is something that has, was it in the 50s? Smell-O-Vision. Yeah, Smell-O-Vision. And when they were trying to, you know, they had the tingler and all those kind of like, you know, I guess, 40X, the original 40X, where they're trying to make the screening as visceral as they can.

15:12Nick de Semlyen:So your seat is buzzing and there's water squirting at you and the smell of rotting poop banana, I guess. But anyway, Jamie was very brave and he went along to a screening and you get given a card and you scratch it and you sniff it and you regret your life choices. But I really, for his bravery, I'm putting it in my top 10. that's fair did you know that uh john waters film polyester used odorama which was a similar kind of scratch and sniff thing that was given to to audiences because smellivision was actually piped into the room but this scratch and sniff thing has uh yeah has a long and storied history i did not know that well it's back john waters would be pleased yes if you fancy a ghost puke um dead lover is apparently showing now i'm not sure how long for get down there um okay number 3 is also in the front section.

16:01Nick de Semlyen:It's a great little regular idea that Beth came up with called The MVP, which is just a way of us saluting one person each month. And you chose me for my breakdown of the Dune Part 3 trailer. That's very nice of you, Nick. Thank you. I appreciate that. Let's come back to that. No, The MVP this month is James Ortiz who is, as you know, the voice and puppeteer of Rocky in Project Tell Mary. Yes, exactly. Already the most quoted character of the year in the Empire Office and probably everywhere. including on spaceships, NASA spaceships. But yeah, I don't know if anyone has made such an impact in cinema this year as James Ortiz for puppeting this bizarre creation.

16:38Nick de Semlyen:So we catch up with him. Alex Godfrey, we should say, spoke to James Ortiz. The question is, Nick, did he fist his bump? That is a question for Alex and possibly HR. What happens in the interview stays in the interview. Exactly. But yeah, there's some great little nuggets there. We find out that Rocky's original voice was a bit Catherine Hepburn. Of course it was. I'm struggling to imagine, but not sure that would have worked. All right, number four, we talked to Bruce Dickinson of Iron Maiden. Are you an Iron Maiden fan? You have the demeanor of someone who might be. So I have the demeanor of a man who was never an Iron Maiden fan, but was taught fencing by Bruce Dickinson.

17:12What? So I do have an inside track to Iron Maiden via the end of a foil. Yes.

17:18Nick de Semlyen:Sorry, there are two bombshells in one sentence there. You were taught fencing. Yes. First of all, you can fence. I can, yes. Is that a useful skill? Not massively. And how did Bruce Dickinson come into this? He is a long-time competitive fencer. In fact, I believe he was actually ranked almost top 10 in the UK at one point in the 1980s. But around that time, he would teach fencing, and he taught fencing at my school. And so I was a pupil of Bruce Dickinson. Absolutely mind-blowing bombshell. Have you been paragliding with Alice Cooper? No, never. never it's just this just just the fencing with bruce dickinson that's the extent of my metal sports he is a metal legend um iron maiden um has not only influenced cinema most recently with the bone temple the incredible climax of the bone temple but some of their songs have been inspired by movies like the wicker man but uh yeah we talked to him amazingly he revealed that he had no idea that iron maiden was going to be in the bone temple until after the film came out Really?

18:21No one told him. Did they not need, I don't know, permission for the song?

18:24Nick de Semlyen:It doesn't seem so, because he told us that he heard about it after the film came out, where people texting, like friends of his texting him and telling him. So yeah, that's kind of amazing. That's wild. But yeah, Alex did this interview, and it's a really fun read. And I was thinking about other music legends who we've interviewed. We have Mick Jagger for Slow Horses. We did, yeah. Slow Horses is really hard to cover. For some reason, it's really difficult. as we're talking openly on the shameless plug. It's hard. We try and cover it. We love it. We quote from it all the time. Some of us even have a Jackson Lamb-esque approach to hygiene in tribute to the show.

18:59Nick de Semlyen:But it's hard to get access. But yet we got Mick Jagger to talk about the theme tune. We did. Chris Hewitt, I believe, spoke to him. There we go. So Bruce Dickinson, well worth a read. And it shows that you ask for... Oh, there's an Iron Maiden documentary coming out. Yes, that's the reason. We didn't just hang out. We only think, who should we talk to this week? I don't know. Seal. Yes. You just happen to be fencing. And we said, come in, have an interview. No, we are. There is a new Iron Maiden documentary coming out, which is called Iron Maiden Burning Ambition. And apparently very good, according to our four-star review.

19:32Nick de Semlyen:I haven't seen it yet, but I would like to. It rocks. There's some Bill and Ted clips in there. Yeah. It metals. Okay, well, moving on to the review section. That's a good segue. I'm going to pick a review from here. Just selfishly, because it's a show that I've started watching, and it's on my mind at the moment. For All Mankind. which I believe you are a fan of. I am indeed. So Helen gave this the full five stars, did she not? Yeah, she did. She did. It's a very good season of television. I've seen all of this particular season. I'm very, very excited to talk about it. Actually, I say all of it.

20:01I've seen all of the ones that are made available, which actually frustratingly do not include the finale. So I've seen everything except the very end of it. But it's, yeah, it's very, very good. This show has advanced. This is the fifth season, and it skips forward basically 10 years, pretty much. Give or take a year either side.

20:14Nick de Semlyen:No spoilers. I have remained spoiler free but I have just started season 2 and I think the whole show is going to span 70 years starts in the 60s and comes up to the present day and I love that it feels so epic and it just it'll suddenly jump forward 10 years and you'll be like what but I'm loving it I thought season 1 was absolutely incredible and so I just wanted to highlight this as something I'm excited about it is exciting not least of all because I genuinely believe with this show that every season has improved upon the last each one is better than the previous one and I think it's absolutely fantastic.

20:47I do pity Joel Kinnaman who is under an increasing mound of prosthetics by this point. If you can look like

20:54Nick de Semlyen:Guy Pearce in Prometheus. Oh yeah, he's playing an octogenarian at this point. He's like, oh my god, how do you even begin to get ready for each day shooting? But yeah, it's a really good show. I highly recommend it. It made me want to go to the moon. Five stars from Helen O 'Hara. Okay. Alright, number six is Jet Li. Jet Li. Jet Li. A literal hero. He is a literal hero and And he is the one. Sorry, Chesney Hawks. So this Jet Li has a memoir coming out. It's a very philosophical memoir, by all accounts. I started reading it, and it's really interesting. It's really emotional. He's talking about his philosophy towards life, and he's had an incredible life, even outside of all of the amazing action films he's made.

21:36Nick de Semlyen:If you haven't seen Once Upon a Time in China, parts one and two, they're incredible. um obviously hero obviously lethal weapon 4 and i'm not joking because i love it for no it is it is i have to say like lethal weapon 4 is very far from my favorite lethal weapon i like jetly is an absolute legend but unfortunately i would say that the mummy tomb of the dragon emperor and lethal weapon 4 are still things he has yet to apologize for but other than that legend i really like lethal weapon 4 so that i'm just going to say it's got a great car chase jetly is a fantastic villain it has the least convincing stunt double for mel gibson if you watch the forklift truck action scene at the end i paused it once and it is very clearly like a sort of 60 year old chinese man instead of mel gibson but um uh anyway back to this kevin eg perry um did a big old epic interview with jet lee and talked to him about you know breaking into hollywood how his fighting style inspired hollywood action cinema and it did have a massive impact um and he had to fight really hard to keep kind of the purity of what he wanted to do.

22:40Nick de Semlyen:He talks about facing down a tsunami. He survived a tsunami, like in real life. Did he? Yeah, he's had an absolutely incredible, incredible life. And he also survived three Expendables films. And he also did that. Yes, he also did that. What's his character name in, he has a terrible character name in the Expendables. His name is Yin Yang. Oh boy. Which is problematic on so many levels. Oh boy. I would say character names are maybe not so that's just a special team it's no Lee Christmas but you know what is oh my god incredible so anyway that is number six right number seven in the Shameless Ten is a feature it is Power Ballad written by Chris he spoke to Paul Rudd he spoke to Nick Jonas and he spoke to the director John Carney who I absolutely love Sing Street obviously he did once as well but Sing Street is a massive personal favorite he he does these really sweet emotional funny films that are kind of based around music and always yes and and this uh film is about a uh a guy who does a wedding band which is called the bride and groove i believe it's got an excellent funny name yeah and um he He has a tune which gets nicked by Nick Jonas, who's playing a pop star, who nicks his song, and it blows up and becomes massive.

24:05Nick de Semlyen:So they had to create a brand new song for the film, and it's super catchy. I've still got it in my head. I saw it a couple of months ago. I've still got it in my head. But yeah, this is a really sweet film. Of feuding musicians. Yes, I enjoyed Flora and Son, which was the last film that John Carney did. He also, did you ever see Modern Love? He developed Modern Love for TV and wrote a lot of that as well. No, I haven't. That's good. I haven't seen the columns. Okay. All right. Let's move on to number eight. Another feature. This is Mother Mary. And we talked to the writer-director, David Lowery, all about it.

24:37Nick de Semlyen:David Lowery will always be a hero of mine because he came to our all-nighter two years ago. Do you remember this? Did he? I didn't know that he turned up to it. I know I didn't turn up to it. So, you know, he's done better than I did. Yeah, we programmed an all-nighter at the Pitch House Central. And we each picked a film. Mine was The Frighteners, which went on at 2am. We had a captive audience, so I could do what I wanted. I almost chose a Laurel and Hardy film. I wonder how that would have played. But yes, we were there, and then there was a guy just sitting on his own in the front row, and we were like, is that David Lowery?

25:08Nick de Semlyen:And so we went over and said hi, and it was David Lowery. He'd seen the poster for our thing. Just to be clear, you hadn't programmed The Green Knight or something, and he wasn't going to introduce it. He just rocked up to watch the films. He just rocked up, yeah. How many did he watch? Yeah. He stayed for The Frighteners, because I remember I talked to him and he said he hadn't seen it on the big screen. I don't think he stayed for Barb and Star, Go to Vesta del Mar, but I think, to be fair, that came on at like 5am or something. It was Dorent, and we were all losing our minds at that point. But yeah, he stayed through Bound.

25:41Nick de Semlyen:I'm trying to remember what else. Oh, The Quick and the Dead. That was Chris's choice. Solid choice. Anyway, what a hero. What a hero. And now he has made Mother Mary, which is a new movie. all about, I think it's like out now, right? Or it's about to come out. But Anne Hathaway plays a pop star, Mother Mary. McKillicol plays a former dressmaker who has to make Mary an outfit for an upcoming gig. And it's kind of a trippy, psychological movie with original music by Charlie XCX. And it's got a lot of interesting people involved. And yeah, he's a very, very interesting dude. You know, he's done The Green Knight, but then he's also done Pete's Dragon.