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Metro
03-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Metro
'My second film took a decade to make and is 'not your average period drama''
Director John Maclean is back in cinemas this summer with his second film, a decade after his award-winning and critically acclaimed debut, Slow West. The revisionist Western starring Michael Fassbender and Kodi Smit-McPhee saw him named by Bafta as 'a Brit to Watch' and claim a jury prize at Sundance. It was dubbed one of the films of the year and still has a 92% score from critics on review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes. And now Maclean's finally returned with his second film – 'notoriously difficult' in Britain, he says – a Scottish samurai Western, naturally. Starring Jack Lowden, Tim Roth, Japanese model and songwriter Kōki and Shogun's Takehiro Hira, Tornado sees a Japanese puppeteer's daughter get caught up with criminals when their show crosses paths with a crime gang in 18th-century rural Scotland. A refreshingly unusual combination of things, Maclean reveals that Tornado 'led on' from Slow West as an idea, examining the concept of nationality again. To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video 'In America in 1860, people were from all over the world, they weren't American yet. Then I thought the same about Britain – that it could be a multicultural place, and there could be a Japanese samurai, a French weightlifter, an Irish bandit,' the Scottish filmmaker tells me at the Sands International Film Festival in April, where Tornado is previewing as the closing film. 'I added to that my love of Japanese cinema and thinking, 'Oh I'd love to do a samurai film, but I'm not Japanese – so what's my way in?' The way in was a father-daughter relationship, family and setting it in a Britain of people from all over the place.' Maclean, who is also a founding member of indie-rock group The Beta Band, tells me that Tornado was based on an old music video he filmed with the group 25 years ago too, in the exact same location. People don't normally make a Western as their first feature film, like he did, but Maclean actually saw Tornado as his opportunity to 'play a lot more' with the Western tropes. He was also keen to shake up how British history is traditionally thought of at this time. 'It's always been viewed through novels or class systems or kings and queens, and I just thought there was a place for historic Britain full of more of your outsiders: circus performers and poets and musicians and bandits.' For him, there was also a parallel between Tornado and Slow West with great changes on the horizon. 'Setting it in 1790 I felt was a kind of equivalent to the 1860 West, when things were about to change drastically – the law and the Peelers were coming, and the industrial revolution was coming, and swords were becoming guns,' Maclean points out. Taking a decade between the releases of Slow West and Tornado was not intentional; Maclean's screenplay was written by 2018 and he jokes he was 'going as fast as I possibly could'. But it turns out even if you've made a splash with your first film – and he'd won a Bafta for his 2011 short Pitch Black Heist starring Fassbender and Liam Cunningham prior as well – you are far from set up for smooth sailing the second time around. 'It was just hard to get funding. I thought it would be easier because Slow West was a decent first attempt. In Britain, second films are notoriously difficult to get off the ground,' he admits. As to why, he ponders if maybe the script 'came across as not the trendiest of subjects' but also reckons it was to do with the film's titular hero being a young girl and 'so she has to be a kind of new face'. It was just hard to get funding. I thought it would be easier because Slow West was a decent first attempt 'You do need the big names attached to get any money at all these days.' He did get them – 'eventually' – in Roth and Lowden portraying father and son, and Roth signing up to play the villainous Sugarman 'unlocked a lot of doors and people started taking it seriously and coming on board'. As far Lowden, who is especially hot property now given his involvement with hit TV series Slow Horses and casting as Mr Darcy in Netflix's upcoming Pride and Prejudice adaptation, Maclean was prepared to work for it – and around a few people. 'I actually met Jack at Edinburgh Film Festival drinks and found out that he loved Slow West. So I went back and rewrote the part with him in mind because – just anything to get beyond these people's agents! And to know that maybe they want to work with you is huge.' However, Maclean is far from self-pitying about how hard it was to get Tornado made despite his previous success – although Slow West did not make its budget (a reported $2million (£1.46m)) back at the box office. But it was a word-of-mouth phenomenon that grew a cult audience and charmed critics, juries and fans alike. 'I'm reading a book about the making of The Graduate and Bonnie and Clyde and films of the '60s, and it was just as big a struggle. I mean, you're asking for a lot of money for people,' he observes (the budget was around £3m for Tornado). 'I think anything that you want to do that's sort of – not necessarily against the grain – but just something different …' he begins, before adding: 'I think Tornado is not your average British period drama.' He's dead right in that respect – and what might make financiers wary is exactly its USP. Thanks to a wider shift in the genre away from rigid historical accuracy in favour of more creative interpretations, diverse casting and contemporary points of view – as seen in the likes of Bridgerton, Netflix's 2022 adaptation of Persuasion with Dakota Johnson and The Personal History of David Copperfield – it makes Tornado seem bang on the money. Maclean's 'hopeful' that people want to reinterpret how a period drama looks in Britain. I wonder what he would like to do for his next film. More Trending 'I love the crime genre and the noir genre – but I've got a lot of contemporary music I love, so it'd be nice to make something contemporary. I'm sort of blank page at the moment, so just starting to feel around again,' he shares. When I apologise for pressing him on the next film already, he laughs. 'A lot of directors will have the thing lined up ready to go. I'm just not that guy, so it takes me slightly longer.' Tornado is in UK cinemas now. Got a story? If you've got a celebrity story, video or pictures get in touch with the entertainment team by emailing us celebtips@ calling 020 3615 2145 or by visiting our Submit Stuff page – we'd love to hear from you. MORE: Human leg washes up on beach 80 miles from missing man's body MORE: Energy price cap comes down with average household saving £11 a month MORE: Child drove through Scottish village barefoot listening to Sugababes
New Statesman
18-06-2025
- Entertainment
- New Statesman
A samurai lost in the wilderness
The Scottish director John Maclean's austere second feature film opens halfway through the story, with its heroine, Tornado (played by the Japanese singer Kōki), trying to save herself from a group of hideously threatening men. The year is 1790 and the setting somewhere in the British Isles; the group chasing her is following the orders of head honcho Sugar (an enjoyably dead-eyed Tim Roth). We don't know yet why these ne'er-do-wells are after Tornado, but they obviously mean business. As they follow her, Sugar casually slits the throat of one of his own underlings; even when Tornado seeks refuge in a beautiful manor house, her chances of survival don't look great. The film has been described as a samurai western – Maclean's debut, the much-admired Slow West, was set in 19th-century Colorado – and it does feel like it's been made by someone who knows their way around Akira Kurosawa's collected works. But it's also a gory revenge thriller in which considerable amounts of blood end up darkening the wind-beaten heath, and a period drama that says audaciously little about the period or locations it's set in (much of it was in fact shot in the Pentland Hills, near Edinburgh). Tornado, we soon learn, is being pursued by the men, who are thieves, because she's nicked their stuff. Specifically, their gold. They've stolen two sacks' worth of coins from a church. First the gold was taken from the thieves by a young urchin (Nathan Malone), then Tornado took the gold from him and hid it beneath a tree. What she hopes to achieve with the loot long-term the audience is never told – no one does anything so gauche as explain themselves in this film – but she seems to want to strike out from her father, Fujin (Takehiro Hira), who runs a travelling puppet show. Fujin is also a samurai of sorts, who has taught Tornado how to wield a sword with deadly skill. When they aren't practising sword-swishing, or putting on their quaint little show for entranced and grubby locals, Fujin gives his daughter life advice in weighty proclamations. She finds them, and him, quite annoying. 'I hate you,' she tells him, before he is killed by one of Sugar's men. The film looks and sounds like a better film than it is. Beautifully shot by Robbie Ryan (the director of photography on Poor Things) in a wilderness that feels forsaken, it has the tawny look of a Toast ad campaign. The costumes, too, are gorgeous, if a little distracting: Tornado troops around in an enviable poncho-type outfit and yeti boots, and Sugar's men – including Jack Lowden as his taciturn son, Little Sugar – sport rugged sweaters and overcoats. The score (by Jed Kurzel, who also wrote the soundtrack for Slow West) is angular and appropriately melodramatic, and the production design, by Elizabeth El-Kadhi, is charming. Among the places Tornado seeks refuge is a circus, and every frame of this sequence reveals inventive attention to detail, from the delicate lace left drying in the open air to the circus troupe's rickety carriages. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Even so, moments of beauty aren't enough to make a film worth seeing, and there is something lacking here. Characters speak ponderously and act incomprehensibly. Though Tornado looks deeply cool, with her long black hair flicking in the biting wind, you never particularly care about her. Lowden and Roth acquit themselves perfectly in their roles, but they're not given that much to do. As top baddie, Roth spends his time looking disappointed with the life he's condemned himself to, while Lowden mainly strides through long grasses and remains impassive when Sugar punches him. It's not unusual for films that present themselves as avant-garde – as Tornado does in its trailer – not to have all that much to say. Depths are promised but never delivered; characters are well acted, but the words they're saying are banal. Viewers who go to the cinema to see such films may feel virtuous for doing so, like they're engaging with high culture, but they are unlikely to emerge moved or amused or changed in any way. It's not bad cinema, per se, just rather pointless. 'Tornado' is in cinemas now [See also: Bruce Springsteen faces the end of America] Related
The Herald Scotland
08-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Herald Scotland
You need to see wild movie by Scots director that breaks all the rules
Not so, as it turns out. It's only now, a decade on, that Slow West's follow-up is preparing to make its theatrical bow after a well-received premiere at this year's Glasgow Film Festival where it was the opening film. A blend of samurai flick, chase film, historical epic and heist movie, Tornado follows the titular heroine, a Japanese puppeteer, as she and her father Fujin eke out a living somewhere in northern Britain at the end of the 18th century. Into their lives one day comes a band of brigands led by the ruthless Sugarman and his argumentative son, Little Sugar. The thieves are toting a sack of stolen gold coins, but it's when they are robbed in turn that the trouble begins for Fujin and, in particular, Tornado. A scene from Tornado by John Maclean (Image: free)Maclean's second film began life in 2016, immediately after the success of Slow West. You can't say he didn't hit the ground running. 'Having done a Western in America that to me was a little bit about immigration, I thought I could do the same for Britain – write a film where there's an African bandit, a French performer, a Japanese wanderer,' he tells me over Zoom. 'That was one idea. But then when I started the script, the heart of it started to come from father-daughter relationships. In Slow West, the thing I took from my personal life was a young Scottish boy being in love with somebody who didn't necessarily love him back, and him going to the ends of the earth for her. With Tornado, it was a father trying to teach his daughter his own Japanese culture, and her not being interested.' The process of writing the script continued into 2017 and then into 2018. When the pandemic happened it inevitably had an effect on production, but Maclean says a major issue even before then was one far more familiar to film-makers than zoonotic diseases – cash. 'I was ready to go but we just couldn't find people interested in funding it for a good while. I think it's just tough out there. You need a certain calibre of actor attached to finance films these days, and the actors have to become bigger and bigger to finance lower and lower budget films because – bottom line – people aren't going to the cinema so much.' Luckily, Maclean has never had much difficulty attracting big names to his films or identifying talents on the rise. He even managed it in his BAFTA-winning short Pitch Black Heist, which starred Michael Fassbender. It was released in the same year the Irishman won a slew of awards for his role in Steve McQueen's Hunger and first appeared as Magneto in X Men: First Class. Fassbender then returned to Team Maclean in order to work on Slow West and his co-star on that film was Kodi Smit-McPhee, who would also go on to star in the X-Men films (as Nightcrawler) and garner an Oscar nomination in Jane Campion's 2021 film, The Power Of The Dog. Things are little different this time around. The great Tim Roth plays Sugarman, Jack Lowden is Little Sugar and, for the roles of Fujin and Tornado, Maclean has cast Giri/Haji star Takehiro Hira and 22-year-old Mitsuku Kimura, who goes by the name Kōki. She may be new to acting, but by her late teens she was already a magazine cover star in her homeland, had walked the Paris Fashion Week runways as a model for Chanel, and was enjoying a successful pop career. Read more In fact Maclean had despaired about finding the right actress to play Tornado, even resorting to street castings to try to find non-actors. In the end Kōki was recommended by someone who had worked with her actor father Takuya Kimura, star of Takashi Miike's 2017 samurai action film Blade Of The Immortal. Meanwhile her mother, Shizuka Kudo, is a celebrated singer and 1980s pop star with 11 Japanese number one hits to her name. Maclean laughs as he remembers his first Zoom call with his prospective star. 'After about 10 seconds I was like: 'She's the one'.' So how big is she in Japan? 'Massive,' he says. 'She's known more as a model, but they don't know how great she is at acting – yet. And she came over here to Edinburgh and I think for the first time in her life she was able to walk around without being absolutely mobbed. People camp outside her house in Japan because her parents are so famous, so she's never had freedom. She came over here and absolutely loved it. She could walk around, didn't get hassled. She could perform and act and be creative. She's incredible. I didn't have to say anything to her, there was no direction. She just go it.' Lowden was recruited after an Edinburgh International Film Festival event at Edinburgh Castle – 'He told me he loved Slow West so I went straight back to the script and thought: 'I'm going to tweak this'' – while Maclean impressed Roth with his love of the work of British film-maker Alan Clarke. Best known for directing Scum in 1979, Clarke also made an iconic series of films in the Play For Today strand including folk horror Penda's Fen, Elephant (about the Troubles) and 1982's Made In Britain, which starred Roth as a racist 16-year-old skinhead. 'As soon as we got talking, he could see my love of Alan Clarke and that meant a lot to him.' For Maclean, meanwhile, it was a dream come true: as a student working at the Cameo Cinema in Edinburgh he had been wowed by an appearance by Quentin Tarantino in 1994 to promote Pulp Fiction. To work with the star of Reservoir Dogs made him feel he had come 'full circle', as he puts it. Japanese singer and model Kōki as Tornado in John Maclean's new film of the same name (Image: free) A shared influence for Maclean and Tarantino, both scholars of Japanese cinema, is Lady Snowblood, the 1973 film starring Meiko Kaji as a kickass assassin bent on revenge. It directly inspired the American's Kill Bill films and in Maclean's film it's a touchstone for Tornado's transformation from bored Gen Z-er into samurai sword-toting avenging angel. For the Scot, it's only one of a great many influences, however. 'When I'm writing a script I consume such a huge variety of films,' he admits. 'The most recent ones which were an influence were films coming out of Iran and Turkey. I'll always love action films, so my cinematic bedrock would Predator and Die Hard and Robocop, those sorts of films. But equally I love Tarkovsky, Bergman and Bresson ... This one was influenced by everything from touches of David Lynch's Blue Velvet all the way through to Steel Magnolias even. I watched that for some reason.' A 1989 comedy drama set in Louisiana and starring Dolly Parton and a young Julia Roberts is hard to place in Tornado's DNA. But, though the ingredients may be many and varied, it's the eventual dish which is the thing that matters – and this one has been worth the wait. Tornado is released on June 13. Since this interview was conducted The Beta Band have reformed for a tour of the UK starting at Glasgow Barrowland on September 25.
BBC News
27-02-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
Tornado: The wild west samurai movie set in 18th Century Scotland
Scottish filmmaker John Maclean has always loved 2015 debut film Slow West was still on the festival circuit when he sat down and began to write a new time, he wanted to set his story in Britain in 1790, drawing on characters who he felt had never been given screen time before: the outlaws, the musicians, the circus he was determined to add a samurai element. "At the time I had immersed myself in Japanese cinema," he says."I had seen and loved some of Kurosawa's films but decided to watch his entire work in order and read every book analysing his technique and storytelling style in order to analyse the to-and-fro between the American western and the samurai film."The result is Tornado, a British period drama and a coming of age story. Filmed on location in the Pentland Hills in January 2023, it stars Japanese actress Kōki as the eponymous Tornado, a performer in a travelling circus who learns to use a sword for the show, but by the end of the film is wielding it to the tender age of 22, she has many talents: catwalk model, musician, composer and actor. But she'd never been asked to use a samurai sword before."I was completely new to it so I contacted an action team in Japan and started to learn before shooting," she says."It was a completely new experience, the way you use your muscles, your posture, the mindset." Takehiro Hira plays her father – and the character who teaches her to use the samurai sword. He was impressed by her skills."She was always practising off-set, and posting photos on Instagram," he recently appeared in the FX series Shogun, which is the first Japanese language series to win an Emmy (18 of them).And he didn't doubt John Maclean's knowledge of the culture."I was so impressed with his knowledge of Japanese film," he says."Not just the obvious ones but some even I didn't know."When we first met on a Zoom call, he showed me a copy of my father Mikijirō Hira's debut film which I'd never seen." A founding member of the Beta Band, John Maclean started out making music promos with budgets ranging from zero to £70, 2009, he wrote his first short film, Man on a Motorcycle. It starred Michael Fassbender, who went on to appear in his next short film Pitch Black Heist and his first feature Slow having proved he could make a western, he wanted to see if he could transplant the genre to 18th Century Britain."1790s Britain felt like 1860s America," he says."It was wild and lawless, but things were changing. The law was coming, the industrial revolution was coming."And like the wild west, it's a multicultural mix and a fight for even a band of outlaws led by Sugarman, played by Tim Roth. "I remember coming in for the costume-fitting and what they were quietly doing was crossing time periods," he says."I was wearing things which could have been worn in the 1940s, but there were other elements which were maybe more in keeping with the 1790s. There was an extraordinary freedom in that."John Maclean agrees: "There wasn't that much recorded about these sorts of people then so if you do look up costumes from the 1790s, you get the powdered wigs and the breeks but we really have no idea what ordinary people wore."Takehiro Hira adjusted his traditional costumes for the Scottish weather."We had kimono costumes but not the kind I would wear in Japanese cinema," he says."This had a lot of pieces and I would wear it like a coat although it was meant to be worn like a scarf so we were improvising just as any ordinary person of the time would have done." Midgie season John Maclean says it was the tight-knit cast and crew, working on a low budget, which allowed his dream of a Scottish samurai western to at last become a reality."I was very fortunate to work with cast, crew, producers and financers that embraced the originality of the story. I think the only way we managed to shoot this in 25 days was the amount of preparation done."Kōki is an absolute star and there is nothing she cannot do, her acting skills matched by her fighting skills. Jack Lowden embraced the mantra 'there are no small parts'. Tim Roth, lying on the ground of a freezing Scottish forest delivered a performance which can be fully appreciated on a large cinema screen."For Roth, the freezing forest was a breeze compared to his experiences filming Rob Roy in 1995. "I know a lot of people think January in Scotland would be the worst time of year to shoot a film, but when we shot Rob Roy it was midgie season and I would take this over that any time. It's hard to explain just how awful it was, swarms of them, and unless you keep moving…"One of Roth's other films has an important place in John Maclean's heart."I worked at the Cameo cinema as a student. Tarantino came with Reservoir Dogs and I met him and talked to him and thought I could maybe be a director. "So to have Tim Roth in this film feels like coming full circle."Tornado is out in UK and Ireland cinemas on 23 May
The Guardian
26-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Tornado review – windswept samurai western set in apocalyptic Scotland
John Maclean's new movie is a dour, pessimistic, almost surrealistically downbeat revenge western set in Scotland in the late 18th century – but it could as well be happening in some post-apocalyptic landscape of the distant future or on another planet. This is the follow-up to his debut Slow West, and as with that film it is shot by Robbie Ryan with music by Jed Kurzel (director Justin's brother and collaborator). I have to admit, though, that this does not quite have the energy or the fluency of that previous film, perhaps not the same production resources either – and by comparison it is more strenuously contrived. Yet the pure strangeness of the movie commands attention and there is a charismatic lead performance by Japanese actor-musician Mitsuki Kimura, or Kôki. She plays a dancer called Tornado, who travels around what looks like utterly empty terrain with her impresario father Fujin (Takehiro Hira) in a covered wagon, putting on a samurai show. They perform with puppets, whose little lopped-off heads and limbs squirt out fake blood with tiny ingenious pumps; they also demonstrate samurai sword-twirling combat themselves. They appear to have once been part of a travelling circus encamped elsewhere. And who do they perform to? A crowd of people show up out of nowhere, having presumably walked many miles from the (unseen) villages where they live. Among this crowd is a sinister, motley gang of violent thieves led by Sugarman – a solidly uningratiating and menacing performance from Tim Roth – and his quasi-son (or perhaps actual son) Little Sugar (Jack Lowden), whom he bullies mercilessly. They are so diverted by Tornado's show that a little kid steals two bags of stolen gold at their feet, and so they set out on a brutal expedition to reclaim their loot and punish the kid, which leads into a violent confrontation with Tornado whose samurai skills and martial arts moves are not just for show. It really is a weird drama, made the weirder for a timeline-shuffling effect at the beginning for an episode that takes us to the local manor house, whose laird is played by Alex Macqueen. Many scenes are played out to the accompaniment of high, sometimes almost gale-force winds. And the gang themselves do not travel by horseback: they simply walk everywhere, a disturbing itinerant caravan of bandits on foot who never need to eat or sleep or take shelter. In some ways, they are the evil version of the travelling players whom they are pitted against and the confrontation has the quality of a peculiar lucid dream. It's a puzzle of a film in many ways, but it shows that Maclean has his own film-making language. Tornado screened at the Glasgow film festival and is in UK and Irish cinemas from 23 May.
