HOTEL ARTEMIS
Knives. Guns. Bombs. Drew Pearce’s sci-fi crime thriller Hotel Artemis welcomes us to one lodging you won’t find on Tripadvisor
Writer-director Drew Pearce checks us into his fictional movie hotel. We’ll need a credit card to cover incidentals.
IIT BEGAN WITH a playlist. The songs, by and large, were mellow: sunny slices of West Coast rock and meandering, guitar-driven folk tunes. But the playlist’s title hinted at something darker: “BAD GUY HOSPITAL”. And sure enough, as he listened to the music over and over again, the man who had put the playlist together was dreaming of riots, exit wounds and a haunted, desperate nurse.
“This is going to make me sound like Ben Affleck’s character in The Accountant,” says that man, writer-turned-director Drew Pearce, “but whenever an idea starts to congeal, if I think it’s got legs, I start a little notebook, a playlist and a Dropbox folder for photos. Those three things are my starting points.” By 2012, when “BAD GUY HOSPITAL” first began to develop in his mind, Pearce already had Hollywood heat, having co-written Iron Man 3 with Shane Black and helped Christopher Mcquarrie break the story for Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation. But inspired by the words of Sidney Lumet in his book Making Movies — “If there’s a chance to direct, take it! Period” — Pearce was looking to shoot a movie of his own. Some major offers had been dangled under his nose, but kept spluttering out like bits of malfunctioning Stark-tech. “Those bigger movies usually depend on one of the three Chrises saying yes. And the Chrises are very busy. The Chris diaries are chock-a-block,” he notes. So he decided to create something for himself to direct, a low-budget crime film that would have his personality all over it.
That film is Hotel Artemis. Boasting a small but wonderfully eclectic ensemble cast, it’s a hardboiled sci-fi noir set in 2028 in a Los Angeles that’s falling apart: the private company that controls the city’s water supply has cut it off, sparking off riots on the streets. For the people holed up in a top-secret hospital catering exclusively to injured villains, however, there are more pressing concerns. Namely, getting through the night without dying from their wounds or, worse, pissing off the ultimate crime lord, the dreaded Wolf King of LA, who punishes those who cross him in unspeakable ways.
“I like bubble movies,” says Pearce. “I’m a huge [John] Carpenter fan. And I’ve always loved bad-guy places.
Drunken Angel, the Kurosawa movie, is about a drunk doctor who looks after criminals, and it’s really charming. There’s a brilliant Chow Yun-fat movie called Peace Hotel which demonstrates that bad-guys-in-one-place vibe. But my favourite movie of all time is Casablanca. That was the main inspiration for Hotel Artemis, actually.”
It may cater exclusively to rough and tough lawbreakers, but the Artemis is still an impressively swanky set of digs. Each bad guy gets their own Art Deco-styled suite/operating room on the building’s penthouse floor, all of them filled with small but telling details. And Pearce was happy to give us concierge service, talking us through the chambers — and their residents — one by one.
The largest suite in the Artemis, this room is occupied by the person who operates the hotel, known to most as The Nurse (Jodie Foster). Bedraggled and graying, assisted only by a man-mountain helper known as Everest (Dave Bautista), she has had a tough life, and her motives for running the place are initially unclear. “She’s a shut-in,” says Pearce. “She went through a terrible tragedy 20-odd years ago, and the Artemis has become kind of a gilded cage, a prison of her own making, which it transpires wasn’t entirely of her own making as the movie goes on. The room has the comfort of a cell — the way you basically create an entire life in one room.”
Prone to moments of anxiety, The Nurse listens to music to calm her nerves — early on she gives a vinyl copy of The Mamas & The Papas’ ‘Hotel California’ a spin on an antique turntable. “Music is so crucial to the movie,” Pearce explains. “I was born in Scotland and my parents are both Scottish, but all we listened to was British folk music and shit-tons of American West Coast music. I think it’s a Scottish thing — the Caledonian wish to hit the West Coast is a big one, possibly because the east coast of Scotland is flinty and a little colder than a Santa Monica beach.”
This old-school tech is counterposed by a super-hightech digital screen, which in the other rooms is used as an operating curtain but here is used by the savvy sawbones as a TV. “It’s Russian military tech,” says Pearce, “and the brand name is Danko, which is a double reference. [Rick] Danko is from The Band, but it’s also the name of the Schwarzenegger character in Walter Hill’s Red Heat. There’s a shit-ton of Walt Hill in this movie.”
‘Honolulu’ (Brian Tyree Henry) is a fuck-up felon with a history of drug addiction, who has been badly injured in the movie’s opening set-piece, entering the hotel with an “air-conditioned liver”. Henry was only on set for three days, and spent much of that time grimacing, given that Honolulu endures the most extensive surgery of any character in the film. In fact, his entire liver has to be scanned and rebuilt by an organic printer, something which Pearce claims may be possible in the not-so-far-off future.
“Over the past eight years I’ve accumulated this amazing team of futurists,” he says. “Some of them from NASA, some of them from Homeland Security. When you ask around and say, ‘I’m working on Iron Man 3,’ people respond. They just want to be able to tell their friends.” The main futurist on Hotel Artemis, Thomas Wagner, is a senior NASA engineer who helped create the movie’s gadgets, all of them extrapolations of existing technology. These include a polyps spray, used to rapidly heal bullet wounds, plus hologram phones, laser-scalpels and the aforementioned printer.
“The sci-fi element is a practical thing,” says Pearce. “The characters come in legitimately fucked up and bloody, but then you want them to be able to do stuff, because it’s all set over one evening. If you take the reality of the injuries away, you kind of take the stakes away.”
This suite in fact hosts two guests — Honolulu’s brother (Sterling K. Brown), codenamed Waikiki, is in an adjourning room. A straighter arrow than his sibling, he’s a bank robber who refuses to fly outside mainland America, unable to reach the exotic locales portrayed on giant murals in each suite. “When writing the movie I knew I’d be cutting between bedrooms, and I didn’t want to colour-grade differently, like Traffic,” explains Pearce. “So the murals were a way to make every room aesthetically different. Because it’s the penthouse floor of a fashionable LA hotel from the 1920s era, I loved the idea that these were the grander rooms, with each themed on one of the big holiday destinations of the time. And I thought it was interesting to have a movie where everyone is trapped and desperate to get out; they have these giant views of freedom and a different life taunting them the whole time.”
Henry and Brown have known each other for almost a decade, adding some depth to their fraternal relationship. “They’re both classically trained actors, and had a bond
I could immediately tap into,” Pearce says. “Brian is probably better known [in the UK] because he’s Paper Boi in Atlanta.
I’m very proud that Sterling’s first leading-man role in a movie is in this. And I doubt it will be his last. He’s my favourite part of Black Panther.”
Finally, watch out for another sly reference on a bit of technology: the suite’s 3D printer is made by a fictional company called Marlowe, a nod to Raymond Chandler’s legendary gumshoe. It’s apt, given this is a place where visitors hope to get some rest, but could well end up sleeping the big sleep instead.
“You can’t pick what you’re good at,” says Nice (Sofia Boutella) at one point to another hotel resident. And what she’s good at, it turns out, is pretty much everything. A cocktail-dress-clad contract killer, she’s wily enough to run rings around everyone she encounters, putting a secret plan into effect and even successfully breaking the hotel’s strict no-smoking policy by puffing Gitanes in her room.
“Sofia is essentially Nice in real life,” laughs Pearce. “Though I’m not saying she’s killed people — you’ll have to ask her about that. She was the first person I spoke to about the role and I remember her Facetiming me from a hotel — she was smoking a cigarette and sitting on a terrace with 20 other people there, speaking at the top of her voice, giving no shits whatsoever. It was the most French thing I’ve ever seen in my life.”
No Facetime for Nice: being one of the world’s top assassins, she has access to all of 2028’s top-of-the-line toys, including a snazzy “egg” phone. (Its logo: not an Apple apple, but an avocado.) And while the character has a connection to and history with Waikiki, she won’t let anything get between her and her mission. Something which ultimately leads to a battle royale between her and a small army of goons.
“I really wanted a movie where the main action sequence was owned by a woman,” recalls Pearce. “And it being Sofia, there’s literally only a single shot which isn’t her doing her own stunt. The only reason she’s not in that one is that legally we couldn’t insure her, because it was a shot where people regularly break their necks pulling the move.”
Few of Hotel Artemis’ characters are people you would want to be trapped in a lift with. But the film only has one atomic-grade dickhead: yuppy arms-dealer Acapulco (Charlie Day), a man so awful that he refers to his Gucci jacket as “the Gooch”.
“Charlie’s a good friend of mine, so I knew he could be a brilliant arsehole,” Pearce says. “I wanted Acapulco to represent toxic straight-white-male privilege. He has slyly supplied some of the weapons used in the water riots outside the hotel. But like every person in his position, he in no way associates the problem outside with the thing he did.” The character was partly inspired by Pearce’s experience writing Tony Stark seven years before. “I liked the idea of imagining what a real-life rich Los Angeles arms dealer would be like. And he would not be as charming as Tony — even the Afghanistan Tony.”
The Acapulco suite is flecked with gold. His shirt is made from the same silk that Mick Jagger used to wear in the 1970s. And his look is pure sleaze-rock, from the scuzzy moustache to the obnoxiously on-display chest hair. “Acapulco’s definitely a guy who still likes Guns N’ Roses,” says the director. “He listens to whatever the hip-hop of 2028 is, because he’s still going to nightclubs with 19-year-old Russian models. But his spirit-animal music is probably Stryper.”
The hotel’s final suite initially sits empty. Then comes word that the feared, fabled Wolf King of LA — crime boss and the owner of Hotel Artemis — is on his way. For everybody in the Artemis, the stakes have suddenly been jacked up considerably.
The Wolf King’s name was inspired by the title of The Mamas & The Papas frontman John Phillips’ first solo album. And while the character was originally going to be a Russian mobster, in the end Pearce went in a different direction, making him a laid-back Malibu dude in cashmere and sandals, and casting Jeff Goldblum. “It’s interesting for Jeff, because it’s tough for him to be evil,” he says. “I kept having to remind him about the darkness, but he really got there. People forget that he’s been sinister before. He was brilliant in Deep Cover. I’d love to see him play bad guys more.”
The Niagara suite is the setting for one of the film’s pivotal moments: a crucial conversation between the Wolf King and the Nurse. And the mural behind them, portraying two small figures plummeting down the fabled falls, lends the scene extra weight. “There’s a theme of water going through the movie,” says Pearce. “It represents power. And the idea of this poor little woman sitting under this giant waterfall when you realise what happened to her and the part water played in it, that felt like a powerful image.”
One major change did occur in pre-production: for several drafts of the screenplay, the room was actually called the Blackpool suite. “Oddly enough,” reveals Pearce, “Blackpool was one of the top five international vacation destinations of the 1920s.” Ultimately, though, it was switched for something a little more glamorous. Probably for the best — even California’s deadliest crime lord might have trouble being taken seriously beneath a painting of some shivering pensioners and a donkey. HOTEL ARTEMIS IS IN CINEMAS FROM 20 JULY