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July/August 2024

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t's been 40 years since Beverly Hills Cop broke box office re- cords, sent its hit-packed soundtrack to the top of the charts, helped invent the action/comedy genre and cemented Ed- die Murphy's status as a superstar. Now Murphy's alter ego Axel Foley is back in Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F, the fourth installment of the franchise's tales of the maverick Detroit cop on the loose in the land of the rich and famous. After his daughter's life is threatened, Foley teams up with a new partner (Jo- seph Gordon-Levitt) and old pals Billy Rosewood (Judge Reinhold) and John Taggart (John Ashton) to turn up the heat and uncover a conspiracy, leav- ing plenty of room for awesome chase sequences and the comedian's non-stop comedy routines. The new film, streaming on Netflix and once again produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, was directed by Australian director Mark Molloy, who is making his feature film directorial debut following an award-winning career directing com- mercials and television. His creative team included editor Dan Lebental, director of photography Eduard Grau, VFX supervi- sor Bryan Grill and composer Lorne Balfe. Here, in an exclusive interview with Post, Molloy talks about the challenges of making the film, collaborating with Murphy and Bruckheimer, and his love of editing and post. This is a huge project for your movie directorial debut. Did you feel like you'd jumped in the deep end? "Yes, the very, very deep end, and I defi- nitely picked a big film for my first one. It wasn't a shock, but everything was big about it, from working with Eddie and Jerry Bruckheimer, to all the great actors, to the sheer scale of the shoot, and then the weight of the franchise." How did your background in commercials and TV help prepare you for this? "I've probably been on more sets than most directors, and my whole career's been spent shooting, so that part of it's all fine. I know where I want the camera and so on. That's the easy part for me. The new part was the whole scale of it and the different dynamics of a film like this." What sort of film did you set out to make? "When I read the script, I told Jerry, 'I want to make an '80s action/comedy.' I loved the first two films in the series and I wanted to go back to the well and make a film with the same essence and spirit as those." This is really Eddie Murphy's baby. Talk about how you collaborated with Eddie on this. Any surprises? "You're right, it's definitely Eddie and Jerry's baby, and Eddie told me it's the most important role he's ever played. As for surprises, you know going in he's one of the great comedians of all time and that he's definitely going to bring the funny, but it's amazing just how di- aled into character he was. And not just in the scene, but how dialed in he was to the bigger picture of Axel, and how the character would behave 40 years after we first met him. And he's just such a great actor, and he'd take a little moment or a line of dialogue and do so much with it, with just a look or the way he'd phrase it." What were the big technical challenges of pulling this all together? "My other pitch for the movie was to go back to the first films and shoot as much as possible in-camera — no green screen, no 3D, none of that shit. I feel now in these kinds of films it's all so per- fect and choreographed and designed that you just don't feel the danger anymore. So I wanted to go back and do it all in-camera — but that's not so easy these days, and it's far easier to build it all in 3D. We had some huge helicopter chases, and I was like, 'I want to make mistakes, and have that sense that the camera might get smashed.' And they did get smashed. And while we shot so much of it in-camera, we also had to in- tegrate post and all the VFX on day one. You have to on a big film like this." Did you do a lot of previs? "I did a lot of storyboarding and some previs, which Halon did. All the action scenes were very designed, but in a way that allowed for some spontaneity, so you're not locked into a shot or frame. I wanted a bit more freedom, and a cou- ple of times the GoPro cameras did get smashed, and I loved that, and we used all that footage." Cinematographer Eduard Grau shot this. Talk about the look you went for. "We talked a lot about the visual ap- proach, and Marty Brest and Tony Scott, who directed the first and second films respectively, gave us great points of MARK MOLLOY — BEVERLY HILLS COP: AXEL F THIS SUCCESSFUL COMMERCIAL & TV DIRECTOR MAKES HIS FEATURE DEBUT I DIRECTOR'S CHAIR www.postmagazine.com 8 POST JULY/AUG 2024 BY IAIN BLAIR Molloy directing Taylour Paige and Eddie Murphy.

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