The cold was brutal and so were the gangsters. It was the first \u2013 and worse, only \u2013 day of shooting, and when cinematographer Julio Macat threaded some film into his camera, it was so cold that the film snapped. The gangsters flitted around menacingly, fedoras and machine guns at the ready.<\/p>\n
Macat was hoping to make a movie that was frightening and strange. \u201cThe goal,\u201d he says, \u201cwas to scare a kid.\u201d And so, even though it was 1990, he chose to shoot the noir like it was the 40s, with black and white film, fog filters on the camera lenses, and an intense, old-fashioned lighting setup to cast deep shadows on the set.<\/p>\n
Macat needed to do all of this to make the perfect family Christmas film.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s amazing to me how a lot of people don\u2019t know that it\u2019s not a real movie,\u201d says Macat, almost 40 years later. He is talking \u2013 of course \u2013 about Angels with Filthy Souls, the film that sits inside the festive classic Home Alone. Our hero Kevin McCallister (Macaulay Culkin) watches the gangster flick wide-eyed when he\u2019s left \u2013 you guessed it \u2013 home alone, and the fake film\u2019s action sequences inspire Kevin\u2019s later capers.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
But Angels with Filthy Souls ended up looking so realistic that audiences \u2013 including, for his \u201centire childhood\u201d, the actor Seth Rogen<\/a> \u2013 thought it was a real golden oldie.<\/p>\n How do you make a film-inside-a-film? They are a fairly frequent but tragically understudied phenomenon \u2013 the Wikipedia entry, \u201cList of films featuring fictional films\u201d collates about 120 of them, but there are actually hundreds more. \u201cThey\u2019re all great in their own way,\u201d says Lynn Fisher, the 40-year-old creator of the speciality website \u201cNestflix<\/a>\u201d, which catalogues more than 1,000 stories nested in other stories. \u201cI especially appreciate ones that obviously took a lot of effort to create. It\u2019s the small details that really make it.\u201d<\/p>\n Fisher created Nestflix during a bout of unemployment in 2021 \u2013 she crafted the site to look like a streaming service. Ever since she learned that Angels with Filthy Souls wasn\u2019t a real movie, the Arizona-based web designer has been fascinated by what she calls \u201cnested films\u201d. Her other favourites are teen drama The Pink Opaque<\/a> from the psychological horror I Saw the TV Glow and the spy biopic Austinpussy from Austin Powers in Goldmember.<\/p>\n Strangely, Home Alone isn\u2019t the only festive film to host a fake film \u2013 it\u2019s a fairly common occurrence. There\u2019s Turbo Man: The Motion Picture<\/a> in Arnold Schwarzenegger\u2019s Jingle All the Way and The Night the Reindeer Died<\/a> in Scrooged, not to mention the trailer for action film Deception in The Holiday.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n \u201cI think they ground things,\u201d says Macat, \u201cit makes a movie more believable.\u201d It makes sense that festive films need to be grounded with a bit of (fake) reality \u2013 it\u2019s a speedy way to show the audience that fantastical Christmas magic is actually occurring in the real world. The Holiday\u2019s production designer Jon Hutman has another theory. \u201cUsually when there\u2019s a film within a film the characters come to recognise that they are within the movie of their own lives,\u201d he says, \u201cand they have to rise, on some level, to being the hero of their own stories.\u201d<\/p>\n Audiences see less than 30 seconds of Deception in The Holiday, but nonetheless numerous online commenters wish the film was real. The action movie follows \u201cyour average 20-year-old\u201d Rebecca Green (Lindsay Lohan), a waitress who is left something mysterious in her estranged father\u2019s will. There are gunshots, explosions and steamy kisses.<\/p>\n \u201cYou try to make it good without making it distracting,\u201d Hutman says of making a film-within-a-film. As the set designer on The Holiday, Hutman was focused on bringing to life the now famous houses in the movie \u2013 an adorable English cottage and sprawling LA mansion. In comparison, he had to make the cafe in Deception understated and undistracting, while action sequences on an industrial-looking staircase and behind a chain-link fence set the tone with familiar tropey visuals. \u201cYou want it to be beautiful and clear and hopefully a little bit elegant and simple,\u201d Hutman says.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n While Hutman admits that movies-within-movies can often be an \u201cafterthought\u201d for production, he says he personally treats these scenes the same as any others. Macat, too, certainly handled Angels with Filthy Souls like it was a real blockbuster \u2013 even though he had to shoot it in just one day, the final prep day before principal filming on Home Alone began.<\/p>\n \u201cYou\u2019re scared shitless, because it\u2019s the first thing that the studio will see,\u201d Macat says. It was his first movie as director of photography, and he battled impostor syndrome on set, particularly because he hadn\u2019t used black and white film since film school. Nonetheless, when shooting started: \u201cI could tell that we were doing something different and interesting.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt was obviously inspired by Angels with Dirty Faces, and that sort of gangster type movie from 1938,\u201d Macat explains. Because the old school film that Macat was shooting on wasn\u2019t as light-sensitive as modern stuff, he required five times the amount of lighting \u2013 he also put some black netting over the lens to make the shots seem more vintage. Then there were smoke machines and a vintage Tommy gun used to pump the gangster \u201cSnakes\u201d full of lead. \u201cIt was all with the intent to shoot something that a kid hadn\u2019t seen before that would scare the pants off him when he\u2019s watching it by himself.\u201d<\/p>\n The Night the Reindeer Died in Scrooged. Photograph: Paramount<\/p>\n In 2006, cinematographer Baz Irvine was about to work with auteur Nicolas Roeg on the supernatural horror Puffball \u2013 but then he broke his arm in a snowboarding accident. \u201cI had this idea that I was going to be this leading light in alternative indie cinema in the UK and Ireland,\u201d Irvine says \u2013 but, with a plaster cast up to his shoulders, he had to pull out of Puffball and scrabble for less physically demanding work. That\u2019s how he ended up on Mr Bean\u2019s Holiday.<\/p>\n In Mr Bean\u2019s Holiday, the titular Mr Bean wins a trip to Cannes. There, he watches \u2013 and ultimately interferes with \u2013 the premiere of arthouse film Playback Time, described as, \u201ca film for all of us who hunger for truth, for all of us who cry out in pain\u201d. Willem Dafoe plays actor-director Carson Clay in Mr Bean\u2019s Holiday; Carson Clay plays a heartbroken detective in Playback Time. \u201cI think Willem was completely baffled as to what was going on the whole time he was on the film,\u201d Irvine laughs. \u201cHis scenes were so out of sync with each other and made no sense.\u201d<\/p>\n Irvine says Playback Time was, \u201cnot just a film within a film, but a homage to so many genres and a love letter to French cinema.\u201d. So, in a way, the cinematographer did get to work on an indie darling. We see Dafoe ruminate in a long opening shot as he rises up an escalator \u2013 later, he runs through various industrial-looking spaces and stares into the distance as a tear rolls down his cheek. Footage was shot around London\u2019s ExCel centre and Irvine estimates that filming lasted three days. He swapped from regular spherical lenses to anamorphic lenses with \u201cthat classic widescreen Hollywood look\u201d to give Playback Time a different vibe from the rest of the film.<\/p>\n \u201cWe just went to town on making something silly and fun and photographic,\u201d Irvine says, \u201cWe were allowed to be indulgent.\u201d The crew even had to crash the real Cannes festival to get shots for Playback Time\u2019s premiere, walking the red carpet before the cast of a (real) Portuguese movie. \u201cWhen you\u2019re making a film, it\u2019s quite gruelling. No matter how creative or brilliant it is, there is a monotony to the everyday,\u201d Irvine says. \u201cSo it\u2019s brilliant to be able to just suddenly put new lenses on, have a totally different aesthetic, and not worry so much.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Fake films certainly aren\u2019t going anywhere \u2013 in May, Apple TV renewed The Studio, a satirical show about a Hollywood honcho who makes movies such as Alphabet City (a 1970s crime drama) and Duhpocalypse! (a zombie\/diarrhoea epic). The Holiday\u2019s fake action film featured very real celebrities \u2013 James Franco starred alongside Lohan, as did the instantly recognisable trailer narrator Hal Douglas \u2013 and so too does The Studio. The show\u2019s casting director Melissa Kostenbauder managed to secure Martin Scorsese for its pilot. \u201cWe felt so lucky he wanted to do it,\u201d she told Vulture<\/a>, \u201cEveryone was excited he was even entertaining it to begin with.\u201d<\/p>\n Seth Rogen in The Studio Photograph: Apple TV+<\/p>\n But, you might wonder, who exactly created and stars in The Studio? None other than Seth Rogen. Perhaps the revelation about Angels with Filthy Souls inspired the star to make his own nested films.<\/p>\n Firm fan Fisher believes films-in-films should achieve one of three things. The first is that the phoney film should feel real, even if it\u2019s a joke \u2013 audiences should say: \u201cI can\u2019t believe that movie is fake.\u201d The second is that the crew should\u2019ve \u201cput way more time into that than they needed to\u201d, that the attention to detail should be remarkable in and of itself. And, \u201cThe third reaction you want,\u201d Fisher says, \u201cis for people to say, I wish that was real so I could watch it.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The cold was brutal and so were the gangsters. 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