CANNES, France: Hollywood star Ben Stiller put away his clown face Monday to premiere his directorial debut in Cannes, a stranger-than-fiction prison-break drama that is based on a true story.
The American actor best known for the “Zoolander” and “Night at the Museum” films directed all eight episodes of “Escape at Dannemora,” the first of which was screened at MIPCOM, the world’s top television and entertainment showcase in the French Riviera resort.
With a stellar cast that includes Benicio del Toro, Patricia Arquette and Paul Dano, Stiller puts on his auteur hat to tell the gritty and fascinating tale of a woman who helped two murderers escape from an upstate New York jail near the Canadian border.
Their 2015 break-out from the Clinton Correctional Facility at Dannemora riveted America.
The interest grew still more intense when it became clear that middle-aged female supervisor in the jail, Tilly Mitchell, was having sex with both men and was smuggling hacksaw blades and burger meat into them.
Stiller, whose films have grossed nearly $3 billion (2.5 billion euros), said it would have been impossible to “do all the nuances of (prison) reality in two hours” on the big screen.
“You wouldn’t have been able to tell the stories of all the characters... or have the chance to lay out their world and build the tension,” he said after the screening.
“Television is now the place where you can make the kind of movies we are not making anymore,” he added.
Imagine, he argued, trying to get over the reality of Mitchell working with a lone guard in a room “full of 40 murderers and rapists, each with a pair of shears, working for 35 cents an hour” for an outside company that was making a fat profit on all their backs.
Stiller spent nearly two years working on “Escape at Dannemora,” visiting the surviving escaper David Sweat for five hours and shooting in the prison yards where he plotted the break with the Machiavellian Richard Matt, a talented painter who wrapped other inmates and prison guards round his finger.
He said the script was based on the anti-corruption report written by New York inspector general Catherine Leahy Scott, which Stiller said “read like a novel.”
“It is hard not to identify with the protagonist in a prison escape, but we wanted to show who they were as people and why they were in jail,” Stiller added.
“You have the freedom to tell these kind of stories on TV and work in a way that is not just about bringing huge audiences to the theaters,” said the 52-year-old actor.
“It is the kind of story that I have wanted to tell but I’ve never done until now.”
The first episode of “Escape at Dannemora” will go out on Showtime in the US on November 18.
No joking: Ben Stiller directs gritty prison drama
No joking: Ben Stiller directs gritty prison drama
- Stiller puts on his auteur hat to tell the gritty and fascinating tale of a woman who helped two murderers escape from an upstate New York jail near the Canadian border
- Stiller, whose films have grossed nearly $3 billion (2.5 billion euros), said it would have been impossible to “do all the nuances of (prison) reality in two hours” on the big screen
Incoming: The biggest movies due out before summer 2026
- From Baby Yoda’s big-screen debut to the return of Miranda Priestly, here are some of the biggest films heading our way in the next few months
‘Project Hail Mary’
Directors: Phil Lord, Christopher Miller
Starring: Ryan Gosling, Sandra Huller, Lionel Boyce
Due out: March
MGM paid a reported $3 million to acquire the rights to this 2021 sci-fi novel by Andy Weir (author of “The Martian”), which has now been adapted for this blockbuster starring Gosling as Dr. Ryland Grace. Grace wakes up on a spacecraft with no memory of who he is or why he’s there. He gradually works out that he’s the sole survivor of a crew sent to the Tau Ceti solar system hoping to find a way to fix the results of a “catastrophic event” on Earth. Fortunately, it turns out Grace is kind of a science genius. Equally fortunately, it turns out he may not have to save the world all on his own.
‘Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die’
Director: Gore Verbinski
Starring: Sam Rockwell, Haley Lu Richardson, Michael Pena
Due out: January
After its premiere at Fantastic Fest last year, Variety described Verbinski’s sci-fi action comedy as “an unapologetically irreverent, wildly inventive, end-is-nigh take on the time-loop movie” with a “hyper-referential script … full of inside jokes for gamers.” The guy stuck in that time loop is Rockwell’s man from the future, who’s on his 118th attempt to save the world from a rogue artificial intelligence. To do so, he needs to convince just the right mix of misfits from the late-night patrons of a diner in Los Angeles to undertake what could well be a suicide mission.
‘Wuthering Heights’
Director: Emerald Fennell
Starring: Margot Robbie, Jacob Elordi, Hong Chau
Due out: February
Fennell’s latest feature is billed as a “loose adaptation” of Emily Bronte’s 1847 Gothic classic —the story of the ill-fated passion shared between the well-to-do Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff, a young man of low social standing and uncertain ethnic origins, in the moorlands of Yorkshire in northern England. Warner Bros. are playing up the love-story side of Bronte’s layered and often troubling novel, setting a Valentine’s week release.
‘The Super Mario Galaxy Movie’
Director: Aaron Horvath, Michael Jelenic
Voice cast: Chris Pratt, Anya Taylor-Joy, Charlie Day
Due out: April
Critics were not especially kind to 2023’s “The Super Mario Bros. Movie,” but that certainly didn’t dissuade audiences, who made it the second-highest grossing film of that year, behind only “Barbie.” With the same team returning to helm and voice the movie (with the additions of Benny Safdie and Brie Larson to the cast), chances are that “Galaxy” will have much the same reaction from the two groups as the eponymous Brooklyn plumber and his brother Luigi head into outer space with Princess Peach and Toad to take on Bowser’s son, Bowser Jr (Safdie).
‘Michael’
Director: Antoine Fuqua
Starring: Jaafar Jackson, Nia Long, Miles Teller
Due out: April
The biggest biopic of the year will likely be this feature about one of the most culturally significant music stars in history, Michael Jackson — aka The King of Pop. It depicts his journey from child star in the Jackson 5 to global superstar in the Eighties, and reportedly does not whitewash the allegations of child sexual abuse that dogged the singer for years (with producer Graham King saying he wanted to “humanize but not sanitize” Jackson’s story) — although Michael’s own daughter, Paris, has described the script as “sugar-coated” and “dishonest.”
‘The Devil Wears Prada 2’
Director: David Frankel
Starring: Meryl Streep, Anne Hathaway, Emily Blunt
Due out: May
With all the original stars returning (despite the reported initial reluctance of Streep and Hathaway to do so) along with the director and main producer, this sequel to the acclaimed 2006 comedy drama about aspiring journalist Andrea “Andy” Sachs (Hathaway), who lands a job as PA to an absolute nightmare of a fashion-magazine editor — Miranda Priestly (Streep) should be a guaranteed hit. If it sticks to the story of Lauren Weisberger’s “Revenge Wears Prada: The Devil Returns,” then we’ll find that Andy, a decade on, is now herself the editor of a bridal magazine and planning her own wedding. But she’s still haunted by her experiences with Miranda.
‘The Mandalorian and Grogu’
Director: Jon Favreau
Starring: Pedro Pascal, Sigourney Weaver, Jeremy Allen White
Due out: May
The latest feature from the “Star Wars” franchise builds on one of its most successful TV spinoffs, “The Mandalorian.” It sees bounty hunter Din Djarin (aka The Mandalorian) and his one-time target-turned-adoptive son Grogu — the Force-sensitive infant from the same species as the Jedi master Yoda — enlisted by the New Republic to help them combat the remaining Imperial warlords threatening the galaxy after the collapse of the Galactic Empire.
