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Movie Planner: Joel Edgerton talks 'Black Mass' at Telluride, plus 'Everest,' 'Maze Runner'

 
Director Scott Cooper talks with Edgerton, who plays John Connolly.
Director Scott Cooper talks with Edgerton, who plays John Connolly.
Published Sept. 16, 2015

BLACK MASS: WHAT THEY SAID AT TELLURIDE

The selling point of Black Mass is Johnny Depp's portrayal of real-life mobster Whitey Bulger, but the Telluride Film Festival buzz belonged to his co-star, Joel Edgerton.

Edgerton ditches his Australian accent to play John Connolly, an FBI agent who grew up with Bulger on Boston's south side and later aided his flight from justice. Connolly was later convicted on racketeering and obstruction of justice charges.

The star of Animal Kingdom, Warrior and The Great Gatsby visited the Telluride Film Festival over Labor Day weekend with director Scott Cooper, while Depp led the film's Venice Film Festival contingent last weekend. Read a review of Black Mass on Page 20.

During an open-air panel in Telluride's city park, Edgerton described his process of playing real-life characters.

"A lot of the time it's like going on a hunt for dinosaur bones. You get a certain amount of them and then you fill out the rest of the shape with whatever you need in order to meet the story."

Researching Connolly led the actor to interview the disgraced FBI agent's former colleagues and watch video footage of Connolly's courtroom, but Edgerton stopped short of visiting the man he would portray on screen in federal prison.

"I wasn't interested in doing an impersonation," Edgerton said. "If you put too much responsibility on yourself to depict the character exactly, it's somewhat of a fool's mission. If someone was playing me in a movie, I'd love to watch that. I'd love to see if they could understand who I am without really having access to me. I don't know whether I could play myself very well, or accurately."

Sitting next to Edgerton on stage, director Cooper didn't sound obsessed with accuracy, anyway.

"I'm not sure that moviegoers come to narrative features for fact," Cooper said. "I think they come for psychological truth, for humanity, and for deep emotion. That being said, Black Mass is based on reportage, two Boston Globe reporters who for years put their lives on the line, were threatened continually. So, they have one perspective. Whitey Bulger has another perspective, as does John Connolly. … So, the truth was extremely elusive.

"What I did want to capture was the essence of these men, and the scars they left on the city. … I didn't want to make a movie about criminals who happen to be human; I wanted to make a movie about humans who happen to be criminals."

ALSO OPENING: FIRE AND ICE

Everest

There are mountains like Telluride's, and then there's Everest (PG-13), the site of a climbing disaster now coming to a theater near you.

The story was told on screen before, in 1998's superb IMAX documentary with the same title, available mainly at museums. The new, dramatized version gives multiplexers the IMAX option plus doomed stud muffins Jake Gyllenhaal, Josh Brolin and Sam Worthington, with Keira Knightley, Robin Wright and Elizabeth Debicki worrying down below. Match that, MOSI.

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Actually, IMAX is the only option for moviegoers this weekend. Everest will expand to conventional theaters on Sept. 25.

Tragedy offers director Baltasar Kormákur (2 Guns) plenty of thrilling visual opportunities: freakish blizzard conditions, close calls, daring escapes, Gyllenhaal's beard. Eight people died on various expeditions, so place your bets on survival for each of the film's disaster flick cast.

Why do people climb Mount Everest? The famous answer is because it's there. Well, Everest wasn't there for screening in time for Weekend.

Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials

My recent flight from Telluride landed just about the time a screening began for Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials (PG-13). I have seldom felt so pleased about runway delays.

Not that last year's The Maze Runner didn't contain its fair share of interest. The mystery behind the abduction and mind erasure of young Thomas (Dylan O'Brien) was a step above most YA literature adaptations. Yet any anticipation of a sequel was diluted by the movie's closing minutes, moving the action to less aesthetic surroundings and the plot toward something too familiar after The Hunger Games and Divergent.

This time Thomas and his fellow escapees face a desert obstacle course known as the Scorch Trials, searching for clues about the insidious WCKD organization that's behind everything. For the record, there are two more Maze Runner books ready to be turned into movies, and a fifth on the way in 2016.

Now, if I can only find three more reasons to fly …