Edward Snowden made his first-ever appearance at Comic-Con International last night, sporting cosplay only he could pull off: “Exiled Hacker-Dude Living in Russia.”
At a post-screening Q&A for the forthcoming film Snowden—which was directed and co-written by Oliver Stone, and stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt as the famed whistleblower—Snowden answered questions via a Google Hangouts conversation from Moscow. The 33-year-old former CIA contractor, who fled the country after releasing information about numerous government-surveillance programs, briefly appears as himself in the movie, re-enacting an appearance he made at a 2014 TED Talk.
Initially, Snowden said, he wasn’t supposed to be in the movie at all. Instead, the plan was for him to meet with Stone in Moscow for a documentary-style interview that would appear on the DVD. But “we just had a good feeling,” Snowden said. “We talked about things. I spoke at length about personal values and things that had been happening since 2013. And I guess he liked it.”
Stone eventually directed Snowden as he played Snowden, a task that required multiple takes. “It was a gamble,” said Stone. “Poor Ed suffered greatly that day. He’s minimizing the damage to his psyche.”
Still, most of the movie’s screen-time belongs to Gordon-Levitt. Snowden praised the actor’s “really amazing” performance in the movie, adding: “Some of my family members have said, ‘[Gordon-Levitt] sounds just like you.’ If he can pass the family test, he’s doing alright.”
Snowden also noted that he never expected, nor wanted, a movie about his life. “This is one of the things that is sort of crazy and surreal about this whole experience,” Snowden told the crowd. “I don’t think anybody looks forward to having a movie made about themselves—particularly someone who’s a privacy expert.”
And Snowden does go deep on a major decade of his life. The film begins in 2004, with his ultimately failed attempts to rise the ranks in the US Army Reserve—where he was sidelined by injuries—and follows him through security jobs in Geneva and Japan before concluding with the 2013 document-leak that would ultimately send him from Hong Kong to Moscow, where he remains to this day. The movie also focuses on his ten-year relationship with his girlfriend, Lindsay Mills (played in the movie by Shailene Woodley), and features supporting performances by Rhys Ifans, Timothy Olyphant, Nicolas Cage, and Nicolas Cage’s Latest Hair-thingee.
For Stone, who directed such enjoyably cuckoo ’90s polemics as JFK and Nixon, as well as more (relatively) straightforward current-events films as W. and World Trade Center, Snowden is the latest in a long line of politically minded films. And, like Stone’s previous work, it required some compression and creativity when dealing with the facts, as many key elements of Snowden’s activities remain a secret.
“These are things that are actively under investigation,” Snowden said. “And this is one of the things that made this such a challenging story for Oliver to tell: There are some things about this that aren’t in the public record.”
One thing Snowden did want the audience to know? “I’m living a surprisingly free life,” he said. “And the fact that Lindsay is still with me makes me happy every day.”
Coming into Thursday’s panel for Marvel’s Luke Cage, there had only been a short teaser hidden within the final episode of Jessica Jones and one other clip released. Ostensibly, that’s what this hour was for: to give fans of the previous Marvel shows on Netflix a better look at Mike Colter’s star turn. But the title turned out to be a slight misnomer, since the sizzle reel that kicked off the panel featured all three current Marvel Netflix shows.
But just because Luke Cage brought some friends to the party, that doesn’t mean the show’s titular hero still wasn’t the life of it. The footage from the new show looked amazing, and showrunner Cheo Coker dropped the best quote of the hour when said, “The world is ready for a bulletproof black man.” And Marvel TV boss Jeph Loeb took every pause in the panel’s answers and used them as opportunities to show clips of the show, which showed off just how talented of a cast Netflix and Marvel have, well, assembled.
Luke tears up a crooked boxing gym, his invulnerability so overwhelming to the low-level criminals that it plays like a slapstick comedy routine instead of a fight scene. Cornell “Cottonmouth” Stokes (Mahershala Ali, fresh off an Emmy nomination for House of Cards) breaking things in his office while his cousin Mariah Dillard (Alfre Woodard) seethes at his brashness. Luke and Detective Misty Knight (Simone Missick) meet for the first time and get up close and personal.
And in perhaps the best single shot in the Marvel Netflix universe since that long-take fight in the first season of Daredevil, Cottonmouth steps in front of a blown-up print of Barron Claiborne’s photo of Notorious B.I.G. wearing a crown, in just the right spot so he’s ominously stepping into Biggie’s place, and muses, “everybody wants to be the king.” Oh, and for good measure, there’s a new teaser for the series, perfectly soundtracked with ODB’s “Shimmy Shimmy Ya,” which followed through on Coker’s assertion that he’d brought about the “Wu-Tang-ification of the Marvel Universe.”
Even if we didn’t get a full pilot screening, that would’ve been enough. But the panel kicked things up a notch when Finn Jones introduced a short teaser for the upcoming Iron Fist series, continuing the trend of dovetailing a preview of the next series along with the one about to debut.
And then Loeb went one better—shocking the room with another teaser, this time for the team-up miniseries The Defenders. It doesn’t have any footage, but it’s another great use of music, this time Nirvana’s “Come As You Are,” with the only line being given in voiceover by Stick (Scott Glenn). It was some masterful setup, lending the Marvel Netflix series the same type of excitement that is typically reserved for the giant film series panels in Hall H.
Peter Kramer/USA Network
Mr. Robot is a show about the dangers of giving your data and money over to giant corporations. Pokémon Go is an insanely popular mobile game that was made by a corporation and could find out a lot of data about you if it wanted to. Ideologically, they seem a little bit at odds. Practically, though, the Venn diagram of Mr. Robot fans and Pokémon Go fans probably shows a lot of overlap.
So, does anyone from the Mr. Robot cast play it? Actually yes: Mr. Robot himself, Christian Slater. During the show’s panel at Comic-Con International the actor raised his hand in an enthusiastic thumbs-up when a fan asked if anyone played the game. (Considering Slater has been a gamer since the days of The Wizard, this is not surprising.)
But that doesn’t mean his castmates think it’s a good idea. Echoing director Oliver Stone’s comments from earlier in the day, Carly Chaikin, who plays fsociety hacker Darlene, reminded Slater just what he was sacrificing to try to catch ’em all.
“I’m just going to say, from a Mr. Robot standpoint, do you know what access you’re handing over?” she asked.
Touché, Darlene. Touché.
Brian Guido
The Comic-Con floors are full of fans dressed up as unholy characters, from zombies to werewolves to the occasional White Walker. But should an actual demonic possession break out near Hall H, we know just who to turn to for help: Patrick Fugit and Philip Glenister, the stars of Cinemax’s West Virginia-set exorcism series Outcast. At the Wired Cafe on Thursday afternoon, we asked Fugit, 33, and Glenister, 53, what steps they’d take if one of their fellow con-attendees suddenly became bedeviled.
“I think they’re already possessed out there,” Glenister joked, eying some of the nearby revelers. “But I’d ply ’em all with some holy wine and get ’em all loosened up.”
“Then we’d have to take them into a room somewhere,” Fugit added, “basically, we’d run your classic abduction, and exorcise them in the bathroom.”
Such a gruesome turn of events wouldn’t be out of place on Outcast, which is based on the comic-book series by The Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman, and which has included no shortage of what-the-yuck moments (the series opened, lest we forget, with that grody bug-eating scene). In one especially gnarly sequence, Glenister’s character had a pentagram carved into his chest. “I sent a photograph back home to my wife, saying, ‘I’ve finally found a tattooist, but I’m not sure how good he is,’” the actor says.
The show’s darker moments has irked some residents in South Carolina, where Outcast shoots (Fugit says protestors have shown up during filming with signs that read, “Outcast is going to bring the devil to South Carolina”). But should the cast ever need to retreat indoors, they can kill the time by indulging in Fugit’s newfound Dungeons & Dragons hobby.
“I had never played as a kid, but three or four years ago, one of my best friends was having their game while I was over,” Fugit said. “I tried it out, and it’s fucking fun! It’s really interesting as an actor, because it’s like an improv exercise.” Fugit’s go-to character? “I play a halfling assassin named Bandy Swiftpet.” (“That sounds like your porn name!” Glenister notes.)
As for the future of Outcast, Fugit promises an especially unsavory gross-out during an upcoming flashback sequence. But what about the inevitable Outcast/Outkast cross-over, in which the Southern hip-hop stars team up with the rural exorcists to pull of a musical-filled caper? Spoiler alert, but according to Fugit: “You just described the season finale.”
Lou Faulon
The math of Valerian is perfect. It’s basically the director of The Fifth Element, plus a French sci-fi comic series credited with inspiring Star Wars, plus soon-to-be-Enchantress Cara Delevingne, plus perennially-wonderfully-weird actor Dane DeHaan, plus a massive world filled with aliens and cameos. What’s the grand total? The kind of intergalactic adventure movie sci-fi fans dream about.
Yet there are times—especially with sci-fi movies—when the parts are good, but the sum is terrible. Judging by the reaction it just got during its Hall H panel at Comic-Con International, Valerian is not that. Director Luc Besson, along with his producer/wife Virginie Besson-Silla, presented a series of concept drawings and scenes from the film, based on the comics series Valérian and Laureline by Pierre Christin and Jean-Claude Mézières, and it looks glorious. Filmed over six months in Paris, the movie, in which Valerian (DeHaan) and Laureline (Delevingne) embark on a mission to the intergalactic city of Alpha, is easily the most ambitious project Besson has ever tackled—and there are sill more than 2,700 visual effects shots to finish.
But there’s no way it could’ve ever been small. Besson has been wanting to make Valerian pretty much since he was ten years old and, as he told Hall H, he “fell in love with Laureline … but wanted to be Valerian.” Valerian, according to DeHaan and the footage of him in action that Besson showed, is a “space bro”—a not-fully-swaggering-yet Han Solo who depends (and crushes) on Laureline. The heroine, because this is a Besson film, is much more capable. (In one scene shared during the panel, Laureline took on two guards with the kind of ass-kicking traditionally reserved for your Lucy Lawlesses and such.)
“It’s a long, extremely impressive list of female characters,” Delevingne said when asked about Besson’s predilection for female characters like those in Lucy and The Professional, “and Laureline is that.”
Another of Besson’s famous female characters is The Fifth Element’s Leeloo (Milla Jovovich), who also got a couple shout-outs during the Hall H panel. By the time Valerian comes out next July, it will have been 20 years since that movie came out. And in that amount of time, visual effects have gotten better (there were some 200 shots in that movie, compared to the thousands in Valerian), the Valérian and Laureline-inspired Avatar has come and gone, and Hollywood has finally caught up with the kind of female-centric worlds Besson specializes in.
“Twenty years ago ago, I was weird,” Besson said. “Twenty years later, the world got as weird as me.”
Hello everyone! First images of Valerian at ComiCon on July 21st!!!! VFX will be temp of course!!! I will keep you posted for the one who can’t be there.