“The goal was to scare a child”: The wild world of movies within movies | Film industry

TThe cold was brutal and so were the gangsters. It was the first — and worst — day of filming, and when cinematographer Julio Macat fed some film into his camera, it was so cold that the film caught it. Gangsters moved around menacingly, fedoras and machine guns at the ready.

McAtt hoped to make a scary and eerie film. “The goal was to scare a child,” he says. Thus, even though it was 1990, he chose to shoot film noir as if it were the 1940s, with black-and-white film, fog filters on the camera lenses, and old-fashioned intense lighting setups to cast deep shadows on the set.

McAtt had to do it all to make the perfect family Christmas movie.

“It’s amazing to me that a lot of people don’t know it’s not a real movie,” says McAtt, almost 40 years later. He’s talking – of course – about Angels with Dirty Souls, the film set inside the festive classic Home Alone. Our hero, Kevin McAllister (Macaulay Culkin), watches the gangster move wide-eyed when he is left — you guessed it — home alone, and the fake-out film’s action sequences inspire Kevin in his later adventures.

But “Angels with Dirty Souls” ended up looking so realistic that audiences — including actor Seth Rogen, throughout his “entire childhood” — thought it was a real old gold movie.

How do you make a movie within a movie? It’s a fairly frequent but tragically understudied phenomenon – the Wikipedia entry, “List of films featuring fantasy films” collects about 120 of them, but there are actually hundreds more. “They’re all great in their own way,” says Lynn Fisher, 40, the creator of Netflix, which catalogs more than 1,000 stories intertwined with other stories. “I especially appreciate the ones that clearly took a lot of effort to create. It’s the little details that really make them.”

Fisher created Nestflix during a bout of unemployment in 2021 — and she designed the site to look like a streaming service. Since learning that Angels with Filthy Souls isn’t a real movie, the Arizona-based web designer has become fascinated by what she calls “intersectional films.” Her other favorites are the teen drama The Pink Opaque from the psychological horror film I Saw the TV Glow and the spy biopic Austinpussy from Austin Powers in Goldmember.

Oddly enough, Home Alone isn’t the only festive film to host a fake one – it’s a fairly common occurrence. There’s Turbo Man: The Motion Picture in Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Jingle All the Way, The Night the Reindeer Died in Scrooged, not to mention the trailer for the action movie Deception in The Holiday.

“I think they’re setting things up, and it makes the movie more believable,” McAtt says. It stands to reason that festive films need to be grounded in a bit of (fake) reality – it’s a quick way to show audiences that the magic of a fairytale Christmas actually happens in the real world. The Holiday production designer John Hotman has another theory. “Usually, when there’s a movie within a movie, the characters realize that they exist within the movie of their own lives, and they have to rise up, on some level, to become the heroes of their own stories,” he says.

Audiences see less than 30 seconds of “deception” in The Holiday, but many online commenters nonetheless wish the film was real. The action film follows Rebecca Green (Lindsay Lohan), an “average 20-year-old”, a waitress who left something mysterious in her estranged father’s will. There are gunshots, explosions and steamy kisses.

“You try to make it good without being distracting,” Hotman says of making a movie within a movie. As set designer on The Holiday, Hottman focused on bringing to life the film’s now-famous homes — a gorgeous English cottage and a sprawling Los Angeles mansion. By comparison, he had to keep the café in Deception simple and undistracting, while the action sequences on an industrial-looking staircase and behind a chain-link fence lend a familiar visual feel. “You want it to be pretty and clear, and hopefully a little bit elegant and simple,” Hotman says.

While Hotman admits that films within films can often be an “afterthought” to a production, he says that he personally treats these scenes like any other. McAtt also certainly treated Angels with Filthy Souls as if it were a real movie — even though he had to shoot it in just one day, the final prep day before principal photography on Home Alone began.

“You’re absolutely scared, because it’s the first thing the studio will see,” McAtt says. This was his first film as a director of photography, and he battled imposter syndrome while filming, especially because he had not used black-and-white film since film school. However, when filming began: “I could tell we were doing something different and interesting.”

“It’s obviously inspired by Angels with Dirty Faces, that kind of gangster movie from 1938,” McAtt explains. Because the old film McAtt was shooting was not as sensitive to light as modern film, he needed five times the amount of lighting – and he also put some black netting over the lens to make the shots look more vintage. Then there were smoke machines and a vintage Tommy gun used to pump gangster “snakes” full of bullets. “It was all with the intention of shooting something a child had never seen before that would frighten them when they saw it themselves.”

In 2006, cinematographer Buzz Irvin was set to work with author Nicolas Roeg on the supernatural horror film Puffball — but then broke his arm in a snowboarding accident. “I had the idea that I was going to be this leading light in alternative independent cinema in the UK and Ireland,” says Irvine, but with a cast on his shoulders, he had to withdraw from the puffball and look for less physically demanding work. That’s how he ended up on Mr. Bean’s holiday.

On Mr. Bean’s holiday, Mr. Bean won a trip to Cannes. There, he watches—and eventually intervenes in—the premiere of Arthouse Playback Time, described as “a film for all of us who thirst for truth, for all of us who scream in pain.” Willem Dafoe plays actor-director Carson Clay in Mr Bean’s Holiday; Carson Clay plays a sad detective in the runtime. “I think Willem was confused about what was going on the whole time he was in the movie,” Irvine laughs. “His scenes were out of sync with each other and didn’t make any sense.”

Runtime “wasn’t just a movie within a movie, it was a tribute to many genres and a love letter to French cinema,” says Irvine. So, somehow, the cinematographer got to work on a beloved indie film. We see Dafoe ruminating in a long opening shot as he ascends an escalator – later, he runs through various industrial-looking spaces and stares into the distance as a tear rolls down his cheek. The footage was filmed around London’s ExCel Center and Irvine estimates the filming lasted three days. He switched from normal spherical lenses to anamorphic lenses with a “classic Hollywood widescreen look” to give the runtime a different feel from the rest of the film.

“We just went to town to make something silly and fun and graphic,” Irvin says, “We were allowed to be indulgent.” The crew even had to crash the real Cannes Film Festival to get footage of the Playback Time premiere, where they walked the red carpet before a (real) Portuguese film crew. “When you make a movie, it’s very stressful. No matter how creative or brilliant it is, there’s a monotony to everyday life,” says Irvine. “So, it’s great to suddenly be able to wear new lenses, have a completely different aesthetic, and not have to worry as much.”

Fake movies certainly aren’t going anywhere — in May, Apple TV renewed The Studio, a satirical show about a Hollywood star who makes movies like Alphabet City (a 1970s crime drama) and Duhpocalypse! (Zombie/Diarrhea Saga). The fake action movie The Holiday featured very real celebrities — James Franco starred alongside Lohan, as did the trailer’s instantly recognizable narrator Hal Douglas — and so does the studio. The show’s casting director Melissa Costenbauder was able to secure Martin Scorsese for the pilot. “We felt so lucky that he wanted to do it,” she said, “Everyone was excited because he was enjoying it at first.”

But, you may be wondering, who exactly created The Studio and its stars? None other than Seth Rogen. Perhaps the revelation of angels with dirty souls inspired the star to make his own crossover films.

A die-hard fan, Fisher believes films within films should do one of three things. The first is that the fake film must look real, even if it is a joke – the audience must say: “I can’t believe the film is fake.” The second was that the crew should have “dedicated more time than they needed to” and that the attention to detail should have been notable in itself. “The third reaction you want is for people to say, ‘I wish this was real so I could watch it,'” Fisher says.