For nearly a decade, Drew Pearce has quietly helped make some of your favorite movies happen in nigh-anonymity. First noticed for his 2008 British sitcom No Heroics, Pearce went on to help write a number of Hollywood blockbusters—he co-wrote Iron Man 3, and Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation—but now he's got a movie of his very own. Hotel Artemis is a clever, taut action movie with an all-star cast playing very bad people on a very bad night. It's also a movie that rewards rewatching, full of clever little references to Los Angeles history and classic cinema. With that in mind, GQ reached out to Pearce just before the premiere to break down everything hidden away in his lean, mean action movie. Like how it might be a sequel to Chinatown. Trust us, it makes sense.
GQ: How are you feeling about the movie's premiere?
Drew Pearce: I'm feeling surprisingly sanguine. It's not going to be giant.
I made the movie I set out to make. I had this mantra right from the beginning—when you do those big blockbuster movies, they have to appeal to everyone. But with this, I wanted to make one person's favorite movie. So if you go into it like that, you can't be surprised if some people don't get it along the way.
We're at a moment where everything needs to be loved by everyone, and most of the things I loved when I was younger were not loved by everyone. Like three other kids in my school loved Repo Man. Everyone else thought it was weird and shit.
What do you mean by "making one person's favorite movie?"
I really don't like filmmakers that go, "I only made this for me." Because if you only made it for you, that is a very small audience. That's not a moving target. That's an easy one to hit. So who that person is is an interesting question—maybe it is me! But I think the person who likes this movie is the person who sees its idiosyncrasies and feels like every one of them speaks to them rather than bumps for them. Again, there's a certain expectation for pieces of art having no flaws or handmade qualities to them, particularly when it comes to cinema—and I fuckin' love handmade cinema. There are a couple of shots in the movie where I could've digitally stabilized the camera, because it had a couple of human bumps on it, and I was like "you know what, there are bumps in Walter Hill movies and John Carpenter movies, and I want this to be slightly evocative of that era."
You've talked about how Korean cinema was a big influence on Artemis—
Yeah! Could you feel that? Could you spot that when you were watching it?
I think so! I love Korean cinema, but I'm not as well-versed in it as I would like to be.
Oh me neither, by the way. I always feel like a bit of a sham when I say how much I love Korean movies because I can't list you a thousand of them.
I guess one thing I feel with a lot of those movies is this fraught feeling when it comes to space, and I think that's what I feel in Hotel Artemis. But what speaks to you about Korean cinema?
Ooh, yeah! I think it's a bunch of things. I think it ended up feeling like more of an influence than I consciously realized when I was putting it together. Aesthetically, it definitely borrows from Korean cinema, and Asian cinema in general—that kind of busted, post-Wong Kar Wai elegiac neon glamor. It felt like it suited what I was trying to do with the Artemis. With this kind of 1920s-meets-2020s. It was definitely aesthetic, but I realized it was tonal as well. If you look at Bong Joon-Ho's movies, the way that they'll go from drama to really broad comedy to sincere intimacy and giant ultraviolence—I feel like Artemis is in a lineage with that. And I don't think that's necessarily just in Korean movies—I've worked with Shane Black, and Shane is a big fan of bouncing between tones across a movie and inside a scene. So I don't think it's entirely Asian cinema that inspired that, but I do think Western cinema is overly concerned with consistency. And sometimes because of that it lacks eccentricity.
Another influence you've described is Los Angeles itself—you've called it a city of doors when talking about this film. What made you want to incorporate it into the fabric of Hotel Artemis?
Well it's still the honeymoon period—I moved here in 2010 and I was coming up with the movie probably at the beginning of 2011. So it just gets baked in, because the love of the city was just starting. That said, I feel like I'm still in the honeymoon period with L.A. I adore it, and it's a weird city to adore, particularly if you're a European or an East Coaster. It's an architecturally alien landscape compared to any of the cities I knew in Europe. That's where the "city of doors" idea comes from—it's just this bizarre thing where in Los Angeles, the exterior of a building can bear absolutely no relation to the purpose or quality of its interior. The idea that the fanciest restaurant in town is in a strip mall is very odd to me! Or the fact that you go to what your friend has told you is the best neck doctor in town, and in order to do that you have to drive to this incredibly sketchy warehouse in Koreatown. And it's like is this the right address? I feel like I spent a lot of my first three years living here sitting outside addresses thinking is this the place I'm supposed to be? Those two things link up efficiently with the idea of an underground hospital for criminals.
The film is set against these water riots—was this because water is a very Los Angeles problem?
Oh one hundred percent! I didn't want the riot to be explicitly about police, or race, because it doesn't take up that kind of real estate in the movie. If anything, the riot acts kind of like a Greek chorus. It's almost there operatically—and also the riot is there as one of the speculative fiction metaphors, where you have people who have paid to be in a place they believe is safe, demonizing this kind of multi-class, multi-ethnic horde on the outside. And that horde isn't the problem. The problem is all on the inside, with these people. I needed something that felt specific and real as a cause for the riot, but didn't feel like it pulled focus. I didn't want to bring up something that I couldn't deal with in the film. Plus there's also been giant water shortages in L.A. over the last three years—by the way, it rained for a month and a half this year so now everyone thinks, magically, there is no water problem in California. That is not how it works, water fans.
The movie is filled with little Easter egg nods to L.A. pop culture as well—one of the details is the bottled water in the movie is made by a company named Mulwray, and Mulwray is the fictional analogue in Chinatown for William Mulholland, the guy who brought water to L.A. Chinatown is about the bringing of water to Los Angeles, and our movie is set during a time where they're taking the water away. There's a kind of nice bookending in that. Maybe Hotel Artemis is set in the same fictional universe as Chinatown.
There's a lot of what you love in this film, but does it have any of your anxieties? It's a world where we can 3-D print organs, but people can't get water!
It's about a woman who has all the technology in the world to fix people but can't fix herself. It's a classic trope; it's Wendy and the Lost Boys. I'm not a person who starts a project by going "write what you know," because I feel that fences me in. I certainly don't want to see a movie that is about my life as a forty-year-old white straight man living relatively affluently in Los Angeles. I couldn't give a fuck about that story. So the way that I approached it is: what do I want to see? And if you're connected to the material, you end up writing what you know anyway. I was three drafts in when it struck me that my mom was the same age as The Nurse, and had just retired from being someone that helped people every day (as an educator) and was staring down retirement and had possibly lost a sense of who she was by losing what she did. There's tons of that in The Nurse, but I didn't for a single second think that I was writing my Mom.
Waikiki's story is absolutely about me, and getting to make my first film as well. I come from working class Scottish parents and I grew up in England, and I had never met a single person that was in the entertainment industry. It probably signifies a lack of imagination on my part, but I wasn't one of those kids who got a video camera when I was ten years old and filmed mini epics in my backyard—honestly because I didn't know I was allowed? My life has kind of been typified by wanting to do things but not really feeling like I was allowed to do them, meeting someone who does them, and thinking "Oh, fuck, well, I could do that!"
I think that's Waikiki as a bank robber in this movie. He's never really allowed himself to imagine himself in success, with ambition. In his conversation at the bar with Nice, she's telling him off, saying he built this cage for himself. And thematically, that's a thing that runs through the whole movie. Characters in cages, often of their own creation.
And you've got an incredible cast portraying them all—but I kind of love how the movie is secretly all about Jodie Foster as The Nurse?
It's also incredibly generous of Jodie. She's not been number one on the call sheet—by her own choice—in ten years. And for her to come do a role with a first-time director on an indie movie as part of an ensemble that she is both carrying the emotional weight for but not necessarily getting all the glory for—especially with a cast like this, people get to walk in and steal a scene! If you're the through-line, then there's a chance that becomes unsatisfying. But if you're Jodie Foster, that just doesn't happen, because she's so fucking good.
You also imply that you're not done with the world of Hotel Artemis—the movie mentions that there are other places like this one. Do you have any ideas about how you'd like to revisit this world?
[laughs] I'm not going to go into the universe hubristically by pitching all the sequels I could make. I thoroughly set out the idea that there are Dark Rooms [like the Artemis] throughout the world. They're not in a chain; some are mom and pop stores, others are bigger establishments. And the idea of being able to explore them, either with the characters in this movie, or with entirely new characters, is extremely attractive.
One of the things I tried to do with Artemis is take L.A.'s literary crime legacy—let's say Chandler and Michael Mann—and re-situate that in 2028. And I'd love to do that with Elmore Lenoard's Detroit, or Miami, as seen through the filter of 2028. I'd love to do that with Parisian crime fiction and see what that looked like in a movie—and wouldn't it be amazing to work with a Tokyo filmmaker to create an entire foreign language Tokyo Dark Room movie that's a movie in the lineage of their crime films? It's that stuff that excites me more than a linear approach to sequeling and prequeling. It'd be so much fun! Imagine you're on Netflix and you're like "oh I can watch a Dark Room film that's set in France, that's a French film." That appeals to me. Those are the universe-building daydreams that I gravitate towards.