Finding her rhythm
Reed Morano reinvents the British spy thriller
A film’s “title drop”, when a character speaks the name of the movie as part of the dialogue, usually has audience members grinning (or groaning) in recognition. The Rhythm Section, however, has one that gets you moving to the music of your insides. Jude Law is on title-dropping duty, as his former MI6 operative Boyd — that’s Boyd, not Bond — explains to would-be assassin Stephanie Patrick, played by Blake Lively, that to fire her gun accurately she must first control her body’s rhythm section, to think of the heart as the drums and breathing as the bass.
Esquire’s man, rapt in row B of Paramount Pictures’ London screening room, could not help but retune his internal percussion on Law’s instruction, and achieved an unexpected moment of zen, along with Lively on screen. Several other sequences in the film turbo-charge your cardiovascular system in more traditional action-movie ways: a punishing knife fight in the kitchen of a Scottish cottage, seemingly done in one take; another “oner”, a car chase on the streets of Tangier, with a genuine sense of peril; and the frantic tackling of armed terrorists on a packed tourist bus in Marseille.
As it trots the globe, avoiding spy-saga cliché and introducing a very modern hero, The Rhythm Section hits all the right notes. Lively is outstanding in the lead and her British accent is flawless. The film’s co-producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G Wilson have performed a similar role together on the most recent nine Bond movies, including the forthcoming No Time to Die. So, since the Bond-makers now have a female cinematic secret agent, who needs a woman as 007?
“Of course, it was a very cool experience for me to make my first action film with those two,” says Reed Morano, director of The Rhythm Section, “but we weren’t making a Bond film. The stunt people had worked on Bond movies and Star Wars and [Broccoli and Wilson] bring other people in the crew who’ve worked with them before. They really supported me in doing my thing, which was to bring something unorthodox to the table as we created something from scratch. I was able to be experimental and do action in ways people weren’t accustomed to.”
Action-movie lovers have a very specific set of buttons that need to be pushed, yet the best action movies — from Die Hard to Mad Max: Fury Road, via Speed, The Matrix, Casino Royale, The Bourne Ultimatum and John Wick — expand the genre’s playbook. Morano’s USP is action with a realness and rawness that gives its hero a palpable sense of potential failure. Even when 007 and the rest are really up against it, you know they’re going shake off that last punch and rally to save the day. In The Rhythm Section, right until the final act of kick-assery, it’s never clear how Stephanie Patrick will complete her missions, or even if she will.
“That is exactly why I did the project,” says Morano. “I wanted to reflect a character who is imperfect and flawed and couldn’t automatically do all these insane skills. The cool opportunity was to see a woman trying, almost pretending, to be an assassin. I love movies and want to see things I don’t see all the time.”
When directing, Morano likes natural light as much as possible, and doesn’t go for the super-fast edits now a hallmark of modern movie mayhem. This makes her action sequences beautiful but not overblown. It’s a visual style she developed as a cinematographer, on indie movies and HBO shows, and in the “Sandcastles” segment of Beyoncé’s Lemonade, and has perfected in episodes of premium TV and feature films. Before The Rhythm Section, she directed the familybreakdown drama Meadowland (2015) and the post-apocalyptic I Think We’re Alone Now (2018), in which Peter Dinklage and Elle Fanning play the last two people alive.
A 42-year-old native of Omaha, Nebraska, now based in New York, Morano has made movies since she was eight, when her stepfather gave her a video camera. When she ran out of things to film, she wrote plays and commercials and cast her siblings. Film was a family passion and she remembers being taken to the cinema aged three, with her babe-in-arms brother, by her thensingle-mother, when a babysitter wasn’t an option.
“As a kid, I would get obsessed with people my age, or people portraying my age, on film,” she says. “ET, I wanted to be Eliot. With The Goonies it was Mikey and all I wanted was to go on an epic adventure looking for buried treasure. Even now, I walk out of a movie theatre having seen something I love and feel I am the main character. I watched Mad Max: Fury Road at Camerimage [film festival] because I was on the jury. My leg was in a cast, I was on crutches and even like that, I came out feeling like Charlize Theron’s Furiosa. But I guess that’s my life’s love of movies.”
In 2017, Morano became the first woman in 22 years to win the Emmy for “Outstanding Directing for a Drama Series” thanks to her work on the pilot of The Handmaid’s Tale. The success of that show has four major elements: Margaret Atwood’s story, Elisabeth Moss’s lead performance, perfect timeliness, and its aesthetic. That stark, modernist-yet-human look and feel was set by Morano, who also directed the second and third episodes of season one.
“I’m glad I got the opportunity to do that, it feels it was the right thing, for me and them, and it gave the show a distinct feeling. The only regret I have is it would have been nice to stay on the show as a producer to continue to be a helpful person. To help raise your baby. So that’s what I’ll be doing from now on.”
Next up, she will be producing and directing some episodes of The Power, an adaptation for TV of Naomi Alderman’s brilliant sci-fi novel in which women become the dominant gender. Having risen to the top of directing TV and film, Morano can empathise with that.
○ The Rhythm Section is out on 31 January
‘I love movies. I walk out of a movie theatre having seen something I love and feel I am the main character’