The Red Bulletin June 2019

Secret Cinema
Blade Runner, Canning Town (2018)
“We didn't want to break the spell, and playing the Vangelis soundtrack would do that,”
says Bennett. “So we took the music from Taffey’s Bar, because it’s a place in the film.
We stretched 18 seconds of Arabic-style dub into six hours of low-end exotica.”
Broccoli. She listened, asked very astute
questions, then said, ‘Yeah, you can do that.’
Next, I got hold of the film’s director, Martin
Campbell, and said, ‘What were you thinking
when you filmed Casino Royale?’ He said,
‘I looked down the camera lens and asked
myself if it was real. And if it was, I filmed it.’”
Jackson, shrewdly, won’t reveal the
contents of the show. “We’ve got a casino –
that’s not too much of a spoiler,” he laughs.
However, fans of the 1959 Alfred Hitchcock
thriller North by Northwest may find the prescreening
narrative familiar. Jackson also
name-drops Sébastien Foucan, the founder of
freerunning, who played bomber Mollaka in
Casino Royale’s opening chase in Madagascar.
“Seb’s been in and out a few times,” he teases.
What Jackson does promise is an
opportunity for everyone to live out their 007
fantasy in a way that no one, except perhaps
the Bond actors, has had the chance to do.
“Spielberg said we go to films to watch people
making the choices you wouldn’t make in real
life,” he says. “We’re putting these choices in
the hands of the audience. You get to a point
where the audience are the performers. That’s
what a Secret Cinema show is.”
“When we bring films to life, that also means
whatever message those films have,” says
Riggall. “When we did One Flew Over the
Cuckoo’s Nest, we worked with mental-health
charity Mind and integrated fundraising
awareness. This year, with Casino Royale,
we’re working with Calm, a charity that raises
awareness of mental health and male suicide.
The film is very honest about what James
Bond goes through, and it’s interesting to
allow that to be part of the story. One gesture
can change your life and sometimes that
thing is cultural. For me, it was cinema. It’s
important to create experiences that can be
a conduit for change.”
Casino Royale is the first Secret Cinema
that Riggall has delegated control of, handing
the reins to veteran theatre director Angus
Jackson. “It’ll be the biggest indoor show
we’ve done – twice the size of Blade Runner,”
says Jackson. “It’s 1,500 people a night, 50
performers. This is closest to when I ran the
entire Rome season at the RSC [in 2017],
when we built a four-show Roman world for
Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, Titus
Andronicus and Coriolanus. That collapsed
in on itself in the space of a year.”
It also heralds a deeper partnership with
the film creators. “I had to pitch to Barbara
Riggall and Luhrmann on stage
at 2017’s Moulin Rouge
“There’s a desire
to escape our
looped existence”
Fabien Riggall may be a master of
secrecy, but he’s quite open about some
of the plans he has for Secret Cinema.
He wants to take it global. “We’ve done
teasers in Berlin, New York, to see how can
that works. Universally, I think people want
experiences that are mysterious, to become
part of a bigger thing. In the US, cinema has
a cultural resonance, and bringing these
experiences to a country where entire towns
transform for Halloween is interesting. And
when we start going to places that don’t speak
English, how do we translate that?”
As for which films he’d like to do next:
“Titanic. The richness of that world could
be huge. The question is, how are we going
to build it, sink it and then get it back up
every night? I’ve always wanted to do Secret
Cinema on a train. And ET – to have everyone
cycle to a forest on BMXs, strap them onto
wires, then they fly over the screen and we
never see them again.”
Riggall may be joking about ET, but
there’s one idea for the future that he’s
serious about: “Once Upon a Time in America,
set beneath Brooklyn Bridge. Transforming
a district of Brooklyn into prohibition New
York, with Morricone and a live orchestra.
I’m definitely going to propose that to
whichever mayor of Brooklyn we have
to talk to. I think that’s possible.”
Secret Cinema presents Casino Royale
launches on June 5; tickets.secretcinema.org
SECRET CINEMA/AL OVERDRIVE/MIKE MASSARO
52 THE RED BULLETIN