Q&A with Lily Collins

 

I recently had the opportunity to experience the love, friendship and adventure of an iconic storyteller in the film biopic of J.R.R Tolkien. From the legendary halls of Oxford to the grim and bloody trenches of World War I, this enthralling biopic explores the early years of J.R.R Tolkien (played by Nicholas Hoult) and the relationships that defined the legendary author he would become. Chronicling his romance with Edith Brant (played by Lily Collins), as well as the various members of the Tea Club, Barrovian Society, Tolkien slowly grows from a shy and bookish young man into one of history’s most beloved writers, seasoned by life, and everything that comes with it.

In a Q&A interview with Lily Collins, she talked about the role she played in this remarkable movie. For those who are not familiar with Lily's work, she broke out as an actor with the likes of Priest, Abduction and Mirror Mirror, where she played Snow White. She then starred in The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones, Stuck in Love The English Teacher and Love, Rosie. She won a Golden Globe nomination for Rules Don't Apply and earned much praise for To the Bone and the TV miniseries Les Miserables.

In what ways did the story of Tolkien resonate with you, Lily?

Lily Collins: Something that resonates with me very strongly in the story is that one can have a soulmate and it doesn’t even have to be romantic. It can be a friendship, and in this story we deal with Edith and Tolkien’s love, and that from a very young age was a soulmate connection. But he also has these three friends who are very much soulmates in their own right. You don’t necessarily know the impact you are going to have on someone and vice versa. It could be years later that you are still having that impact on them. Also, Tolkien, to me, is a creator of stories that deeply impacted my wanting to be an actor.

How so?

LC: I lived in the English countryside when I was little. It was very Shire-like and I used to go around the garden pretending that there were magical creatures everywhere. I would read the books and disappear into this world in my head and I wanted one day to translate that to other people. Acting is exactly what that does for me and, ironically, I ended up doing a movie about the man behind that. Tolkien found the magic in the mundane and in nature and that felt very connected to me from such a young age.

Did you read other books in that genre? C. S. Lewis, maybe?

LC: Anything fairy tale. C. S. Lewis, Harry Potter, Tolkien, anything fantasy based. I also loved reading the darker side of fairy tales, like the Grimm stories, which maybe are not the Disney versions we all know.

Who did you want to be in the Tolkien books?

LC: The elven characters resonated very deeply with me because I used to run around the garden pretending there were elves and fairies everywhere. I auditioned for one of the Peter Jackson films to play an elven character, one of hundreds of people, probably, and didn’t end up getting it. But then again, eight years later here I am playing the woman who partly inspired her and was quite muse like in that regard for all the elven characters. That was something I felt naturally inclined to.

What happened at your Peter Jackson audition, Lily?

LC: I didn’t do well. There was no script to read, just these sides that were quite confidential. Don’t ask me to do it now because I won’t be able to but we had to speak Elfish! And we had to make it up because they hadn’t given us a proper language. It was the role Evangeline Lilly played [Tauriel], so another Lilly, but not this Lily! It was just an honour to just go in for it.

Was Peter there?

LC: No, it did not get that far. So he probably never even saw it.

 

Both these characters follow their dreams so how important was that for you, to be true to yourself and to follow your dreams?

LC: Something that I have always been taught me from an early age is to follow your gut and your heart and to do what it is that pleases your soul. But that doesn’t always come easily. Growing into adulthood has been a journey of discovering what it is that I really enjoy and why I enjoy it, as well learning about myself, and getting to know that road blocks are going to come your way; it is how you deal with them that defines who you are and where you end up. That is pretty much the book I wrote a couple of years ago — the book dealt with those kinds of things, too. It is an ever-evolving process and the goal is always to stay true to what makes you happy and to find people to surround yourself with who respect that, and maybe share some of your interests.

What are your own experiences with writing?

LC: I used to write for magazines when I was younger. I wrote for US and UK magazines, online stuff, and then I wrote a book two or three years ago which was a memoir of sorts.

What inspired you to write the book?

LC: I was receiving a lot of messages on social media, specifically Instagram, from young women all over the world expressing to me their insecurities and fears and feelings about themselves and always prefacing them by saying, ‘I know that you cannot relate to this because you are an actress and live in Hollywood, but this is my insecurity, my issue.’ I thought they were so brave because on Instagram your photo is right there so it isn’t anonymous and I thought, ‘If they are going to be brave and do that, I am going to be brave and do that.’ They are feeling alone and if they don’t feel alone, maybe it will help them get through it and maybe I will find something therapeutic about that, too. So it was really just me trying to say, ‘You are not alone so be brave.’ And for me, I felt I had a lot of baggage that I was carrying around, not that anyone knew about it but I thought I had to get rid of that in order to take on the baggage of any characters I played.

Was it difficult deciding what to sift out when writing the book?

LC: I’m not sure that there was a lot that I left out, to be honest. Maybe there will be a Part 2! At the beginning when I started to write it, my editor said, ‘Don’t sell yourself short. You can go a little bit deeper here, here and here.’ It was interesting because as I was writing, I was shooting To The Bone, which is about a subject matter that I write about [anorexia]. And my experiences within acting greatly influenced my understanding of some of my chapters. Therefore, I went deeper into those chapters and came to an inner peace more because I had worked through them. It was really interesting that they both married with each other.

Who introduced the Tolkien books to you?

LJ: I just remember the time period of being in elementary school and having always had this love of magic and fantasy, knowing the world of Harry Potter and then also Tolkien; they took me away to different worlds. I used to go to the library as a kid in school and I would just sit and read them. It was a private time and a sense of escapism in a way. And then I would look forward to the Peter Jackson films when the trailers were coming out. I got really excited and I would look at the release date and go with friends and I still have all my ticket stubs; I keep all my ticket stubs.

Lily, how did it feeling turning 30?

LC: It was great. I had a great time. It was gong to happen regardless so I thought I had better have a good attitude about it. I was filming in Birmingham, Alabama and my mom flew up for my actual birthday. But then the next weekend two of my best friends from the age of five flew out. We took a road trip to Nashville. It was so fun. We had 36 hours. We rode horses and went to all of the honky tonks, we went to the bars, wore cowboy boots and cowboy hats. It was great, just pure innocent fun and then I drove back and I went to work the next day.

 TOLKIEN debuts on Digital Download on August 26 

and Blu-Ray & DVD on September 9

 With thanks to Sadira Cunningham at Fetch Publicity 

50 Years Ago Tonight Ann Moses Met Elvis

 

As many of my regular readers and visitors to this blog will remember, last year, Ann Moses, the former editor of Tiger Beat and the Hollywood correspondent for Britain’s NME wrote a fabulous guest blog for me about her first ever trip to Graceland as a guest speaker at Elvis Week 2018, and provided me with some excellent shots of her visit, so for this blog piece, to mark the 50th anniversary of Elvis’s first live appearances in Las Vegas at the International Hotel, I called on Ann again, to ask her if it would be okay for me to reproduce a passage from her autobiography (Meow, My Groovy Life with Tiger Beat’s Teen Idols) as she was there on the opening night, and to this day, her account of how it was, is probably the best I have read of Elvis’s opening night 50 years ago tonight. I must also thank Ann for supplying the lead picture of her with Elvis at the after show press conference, just eleven days before man landed on the moon during the historic Apollo 11 space flight. A slightly different pose of the same shot appeared on the cover of Elvis Monthly in May 1970, that featured a six page article by Ann entitled An Elvis Fan, Then and Now. 

If you haven’t read Ann’s book, you really should, as it includes a lot more Elvis. As many Elvis fans know, Ann was seen on the famous 1968 TV Special, sharing the screen with Elvis when her face was superimposed with his during Can’t Help Falling in Love, visited him on the set of his final scripted movie, Change of Habit, went to many of the Vegas shows, appeared in the 1970 concert movie Elvis – That’s the Way It Is, interviewed director Dennis Sanders, which was featured in the book of the 2014 deluxe 8 disc box set and also wrote the liner notes for the 2013 FTD On Stage Season 2-CD set as well as writing countless reports about Elvis in Vegas for the NME in England. What follows is Ann's story of Elvis’ opening live show in Vegas, as it appears in Chapter 19 of her book: Elvis Goes to Vegas (and I follow)... 

The day of Elvis’ July 1969 concert in Las Vegas finally arrived. I left early in the morning, hoping to avoid much of the desert summer sun, because my VW Bug had no air conditioning. By noon, it was 107 degrees in my tiny car, even with both windows rolled down. The air-conditioned lobby of the brand-new International Hotel, with its ten-foot-high letters spelling out Elvis’ name, felt wonderful.

 

The Colonel had arranged for a carnival-themed Elvis fantasyland, with young women in straw hats handing out free Elvis swag. Comical and exciting at the same time, there were custom-made banners, pennants, posters, oversized cardboard records, and Elvis pictures plastered on every pillar and wall, both inside and outside the hotel. Nick Naff, the International’s publicity director, gave me a tour of the thirty-story hotel. It had been open less than a month and, with 1,500 rooms, was the biggest hotel in the world. The main showroom seated 2,000 and was the largest room of its kind anywhere, with a sixty-foot-wide stage bigger than Radio City Music Hall’s in New York City. The International set out to capture a first-class clientele with Japanese, Italian, French, and Bavarian restaurants and crystal chandeliers imported from Czechoslovakia. Each floor was decorated in Spanish, French provincial, and Oriental decor—as far removed as could be from the Vegas strip hotels with their five-cent slot machines and two-dollar buffets.

After my tour (during which I’d peeked into the lounge showroom where Ike and Tina Turner were rehearsing), I killed an hour on the quarter slots and watched tourists play roulette, craps, and blackjack until the showroom opened. My mom had made me a sleeveless, embroidered lace mini-dress from the latest French Vogue pattern book. It was simple but elegant, and I felt stunning. Unlike the concerts presented in Vegas today, the Elvis shows back then followed the traditions of an old-time Vegas dinner show. When the magic hour arrived, I was led to a table just to the right of center stage - as front-row-center as I could get. From my seat, after dinner, I could see Elvis arrive in the wings.

“Elvis live, again!” I wrote in my NME article. “And I was there to see it for you!” I went on to promise that Elvis could hold his own with the new stars of the day, and pointed out that even the deep breaths he drew between songs elicited applause. He performed medleys of all his hits, as well as new material like “Memories,” which he’d introduced on the comeback special. Designed by Bill Belew, Elvis’ black tunic shirt with the four-inch turned-up collar would very soon be copied by everyone from the Osmonds to the Jackson 5, but on that night, it was an original.

So, too, was his humble approach to his audience. “I’d like to do my latest release; it’s been a big seller for me,” he told us, then added shyly, “something I really needed.” He performed two Beatles songs and introduced a new song, “Suspicious Minds,” which would go on to be another million-seller for him. He wrapped things up with the Ray Charles hit “What’d I Say,” clutching the microphone, shaking his legs, and doing karate punches as he screamed the lyrics. Almost before the song ended, Elvis walked off the stage to a standing ovation.

As Elvis performed his encore number, “I Can’t Help Falling in Love,” Graylon slipped behind me and whispered in my ear, “There’s a press conference in Room C3. Get there as fast as you can!”

I practically ran to the conference room, where I grabbed a chair in the front row. Elvis greeted us by saying, “I’m really beat. That was the fourth time I did that show today,” referring to the three dress rehearsals he’d done earlier in the day. He didn’t look beat; he looked confident as he basked in the glow of a wonderful performance. He answered questions for more than an hour, after which Col. Parker told us if we’d like to have a picture taken with Elvis, to please line up. I was third in line for that opportunity, and I have the greatest picture of me looking up into his handsome face. He shook my hand, and, when I told him how much I’d enjoyed his show, he replied with his trademark, “Thank you very much.”

I raced back to my hotel room, typed out my story about the show for NME, and the next morning, took a cab to the nearest post office so I could send my copy out via airmail, the fastest way to get written material overseas at the time.

Ann's book is available from Amazon - or for an autographed copy go here

How I Almost Got Physical with Olivia Newton-John

Back in the early 80s, I was a graphic designer that specialised in the design of record sleeves and tour merchandise, such as tour books, posters, and flyers, and in January 1983, I was on my way to London from Brighton to meet with Arthur Sherrif, Roger Davies' UK rep, who was Olivia Newton-John's manager. The idea of our meeting was to discuss the possibility of me doing some artwork for what was to be the UK leg of Olivia's successful Physical tour which had only a few months earlier finished playing a record breaking 64 shows around North America during a 50 date concert tour, and was expected to visit Britain next on what was originally planned to be a world tour in support of her then best selling Physical album. From a set list, dated one month before the tour kicked off, seen by yours truly, it was obvious that a world tour was on the cards, as an asterisk note denotes three songs (Come On Over, Jolene and Landslide) might not be performed in South Africa.

Although a concert tour wasn't something she had planned to do at that time, or was even keen to do, when the Physical album exceeded 10 million sales, and the single placed her at number one in Billboard's single chart for ten weeks, and became the equal second longest chart-topper in US pop history behind Elvis Presley’s Hound Dog, she knew it was time to hit the road, for what would turn out to be the biggest and most successful tour of her career. Most of the dates across North America were staged in large stadiums and arenas and were pretty much sold out, but the one that attracted the largest audience, and had fans going mad for tickets was at the open air CNE Grandstand in Toronto on the 26 August 1982. For author Darlene L'Archeveque, then a 17 year old fan who had travelled on a Greyhound bus for three solid days from one side of Canada to the other, it was, she wrote in her award-winning book, A World of Good, one of the most magical moments of her life! Having been a fan since she first heard Have You Never Been Mellow seven years before, she couldn't believe she was now in the same place at the same time as Olivia.
 

"There were thousands and thousands of people just like me there waiting to see Olivia. We were all there for the same reason. Suddenly, loud crisp music began to play and the crowd burst into cheers. Flashes from the camera bulbs played with my vision. A giant video screen played a retrospective of Olivia's career from her Country days, to Grease and Totally Hot, to Xanadu, Cliff Richard, and then, Physical. The response from the crowd was deafening. Just when l thought it couldn't get any louder, from out of nowhere, Olivia appeared! I clapped along but I was as so captivated by the sight of her that I preferred to stand and take it all in. The atmosphere was spectacular. Even from a distance Olivia looked absolutely radiant."

Equally  excited was Brad Gelfond, then a young agent, who was involved in the booking of the tour, and spent a lot of his time on the road with the tour. "There was something really thrillingly excellent about being in the arena when the lights go down, and the fans start screaming for the artist. When the artist arrives on stage, it’s the greatest moment. I learned a lot about representing big, popular clients through working with Olivia. The coolest thing for me was that they were traveling by private jet. That meant that they would be based in a centrally located spot, like Atlanta, Nashville or Dallas, for a week or so, and on the afternoons of the shows, the touring party would hop in limousines to the airport. The plane would take off when we got there, and we would fly for about an hour to the next city, get limousines there, and then go to the backstage area of the arena. After the show, before the lights were even on in the arena, we would be in the limos on our way to the airport, then flying back to the city we were based in." Not that was always the case. In Toronto for instant, Olivia stayed overnight, in her tour bus, which also doubled up as a dressing room in certain cities that the tour visited.

With the success of the Physical TV special and video release the previous year, and the album now being in the Top Ten albums of the decade, it was no surprise that she became obligated to providing footage for a TV Special and video release of the tour. That footage was filmed during two shows at the Weber State University in Ogden at Utah on the 12th and 13th October, which to many seemed an odd choice as it was the very same city where two radio stations had banned Physical for its suggestive lyrics, but perhaps that was intended as a statement of just how popular Olivia and her #1 song had become. The final edit for the TV special and subsequent video release of the concert, with added special effects and several songs and video interludes cut from her 90 minute set, was first shown on BBC1 in the the UK as a 60 minute special on 21 December 1982, one week before Grease had it's first UK TV airing on the same channel. In the States, HBO premiered the 90 minute version on 23 January 1983, as Olivia: Live in Concert, and later released on both VHS and Laserdisc by MCA Home Video. As expected the TV special was quickly snapped up for worldwide distribution and ended up being shown on most television networks across the world, as well as being released on VHS video in most international territories. The project was another roaring success the world over, winning awards and accolades and added yet another dimension to what had now become the most successful period in Olivia's career. In Britain it was supported with the release of a new 20 track Greatest Hits compilation and a single featuring a remixed I Honestly Love You and an extended live version of Physical.

Olivia with her 1982 tour crew, rig truck and bus. Photo by Michael Landau

Since the album had been released I had collected a stack of promo material from EMI, for my own private collection, as well as providing me with all the necessary material to create some visuals for my art portfolio to illustrate my graphic design abilities in my attempts to get bigger and better artwork gigs! I produced a tour book cover, an EMI Records ad and a backstage pass, simply to have her in my portfolio! Unbeknown to me at the time, they would provide me with enough material to show Arthur what I was capable of as a graphic designer. But that was before I had seen the tour book that Arthur showed me in his office and told me to take home to take a closer look at it to give me some ideas. When l looked at it, it completely blew me away, simply because it was so arty, creative and imaginative, and was something I felt I couldn't have bettered or even equaled! To me, it was light years away from the kind of tour book I had been doing at that time, which was simple tour book design for the likes of such artists as Frankie Laine, Rita Coolidge and Glen Campbell. Olivia's tour book was what I called the top end of the pop market, the kind that bands like Bananarama were producing.

Back in those days, of drawing board graphics, and being pretty much a newbie in that field, I was still some years away from doing tours for the likes of Elkie Brooks, Chris Rea and Elaine Paige! I think that is when I realised I couldn't better it, and had Olivia toured the UK, as was being planned at that time, Roger Davies Management would have simply done the customary thing and sent the U.S artwork to the British promoter for the appointed merchandiser to change things like the itinerary, tour credits, discography, update the programme notes to reflect her career in the UK, and change the album page from her MCA catalogue to her British EMI releases, so I realised pretty quickly that all I could hope to get out of it was maybe artworking some of those changes, and perhaps designing a poster, newspaper ads, and backstage passes! Back then, before I was a writer, I was chasing several ideas for my Artsleeves design studio, all of which included designing for Elvis, Blondie and Dr Hook, and along with Olivia, I did in fact have mock up visuals for all those artists in my portfolio! What haunted me in early 1983 was the fact that this was likely to be the last time Olivia would tour for some years, so it was the perfect opportunity and my best chance yet of getting my foot in the door, so to speak, despite the fact that it was at that time, out of my graphic design expertise. Having Olivia in my portfolio was a perfect artist to have among my mock ups to show tour promoters, merchandisers and record companies, but like with my ideas for the Elvis, Dr Hook and Blondie album covers, nothing came out of it! Call it timing, inexperience or just unfortunate, but I was chasing something I wasn't quite ready for.

When Physical came out in 1981, the album not only transformed her but also her fans, of which I was one, and had been since seeing her live at the Brighton Dome in 1971. It was like we had all suddenly been given permission to get physical from an artist who was thought of as a miss goody-two-shoes but actually wasn't. By her own admittance she regarded herself too old to be innocent. It was like she was duplicating her own coming of age and was telling a generation of musical virgins to lose their virginity to her album! The impact that the album, the tour, the TV specials and videograms made on me and a whole generation of Olivia and music fans was truly amazing to witness. You couldn't walk into a store in 1981 and not hear the album being played over the loudspeaker system, or see the VHS showing on TV screens that some shops had set up in their stores! Olivia and Physical was everywhere! She was the hottest name in music! More so than she had been in her entire career. And I wanted to be part of it, but sadly for me, there was nothing to be part of!

Olivia during tour rehearsals with Dennis Tuffano

Four years later, I got a taste of what meeting Olivia could have been like, when I designed the tour book for the 1987 Elaine Paige UK tour, and had to take the artboards for Elaine to approve where she was rehearsing at the Nomis Studios in London. After we had been through the artwork page by page, I was invited to stay and watch her run through her show with just her basic band! To be in a tiny studio and observe Elaine sing live, just yards in front of me, was in the words of Olivia's 1980 hit, magic! Although I had listened to Elaine many times on record, nothing prepared me for how powerful her voice would be in person in such an intimate setting. Simply put, it was out of this world and to use an overused cliche, literally blew me away! I imagine that is exactly how I would have felt had I watched Olivia run through the set list for her Physical tour if she had brought it to the UK and had I got the gig!

With thanks to Darlene L'Archeveque for the scans from her private collection of the Toronto Star cutting, Michael Landau's tour crew photo and her after show guest sticker, and to Sabrine Korsel for allowing me to use the rehearsal shot she posted on the Official Olivia Facebook group, and to Bri Leic for the audience recording of Olivia's concert in Oakland on 10 October 1982.

Cliff and Olivia's Lost TV Special

If you were one of millions who tuned into the popular It's Cliff Richard series on BBC TV on a Saturday night, and if you can cast your mind back to September 1972, you most probably remember the hour-long special titled The Case, which co-starred Olivia Newton-John and Tim Brooke Taylor, and like me, are probably wondering why it has never seen the light of day on DVD or Blu ray, or why pre-DVD, it was never released on a commercial VHS, and are probably thinking it's long overdue for a remastered and restored release, especially when you consider Cliff's series was one of the most popular light entertainment programmes of that decade and was the series that contributed to launching Olivia's career in Britain.

For those who don't know or remember, The Case was a comedy caper that follows the farcical aftermath of a situation of mistaken identity, and the unfortunate switch of two very similar bags, but with very different contents. Cliff played himself and along with Tim Brooke-Taylor (from The Goodies), are touring the It’s Cliff Richard show around the Scandinavian countries, when a television recording of the show over-runs, which means that they are late in catching the train to their next destination. Meanwhile, a pair of robbers have just held up a bank and are intent on making their getaway with a large bag full of the money they have just stolen. A fleeting, unknown meeting at the station results in Cliff taking the bag of money and the robbers picking up his similar bag, filled with the music for the television show.

Once the thieves realise the mistake, they are determined to follow Cliff, now split from Tim after missing the train, and do whatever they can to recover their ill-gotten gains. From one country to another, by car, train, even an overnight ferry, they get closer to Cliff, who, reunited with Tim, does all he can to get away from them. Once the police get involved, the situation is resolved to everyone’s satisfaction – or is it?

As per usual Cliff put in a great performance that showed his versatility as an actor and comic, laying the foundations for some of the slapstick that would appear the following year in the theatrical release of Take Me High (recently restored and released on DVD and Blu-ray), which he honed from the years of working on his Saturday night light entertainment shows. As with the majority of his full-length feature films, the narrative was developed with a sense of fun and is interspersed with a number of song performances, including a duet with Olivia, If I Was Close to You, which shows the beauty and blend of their vocals when performing together.

Broadcast during the summer run of his television show in 1972, this special has only been aired once and is now a significant rarity, a curio, and an important document of Cliff’s career as a broader entertainer rather than being pigeon-holed as Britain's Peter Pan of Pop!

With the exception of Cliff's Living In Harmony and Olivia's two solo numbers, the other songs were all recorded specially and exclusively for the special, and have never been commercially released. The duet with Olivia is particularly noteworthy as it was, at that time, only the second recording they had made together, the first being the B-side track, Don’t Move Away, and its extraordinary beauty shows that it deserves a broader release for fans of both performers to see and hear. For Olivia fans, there was footage of her performing her then current single Just A Little Too Much and Banks of the Ohio, the second hit single from her first album, in specially filmed sequences. And for Cliff fans there was the new rendition of Move It! that combined and melded the guitar-driven approach of the original with the orchestral arrangement that was released on his 1967 Top 30 album Don’t Stop Me Now!

A first-time ever release of this special is now crying out to be done and for most film and TV buffs, would be perfectly suited to Network, the video releasing company that seem more committed than most to showcasing unique works of television and film, that have been unjustly neglected and gathering dust in the vaults of TV companies. With their encyclopaedic knowledge of TV and film archives and library content, they have released a wealth of material in stunning DVD and Blu ray packages with spectacular remastering and restoration techniques that would have otherwise been left unseen.

If Network greenlighted The Case for release, the opportunities for extras are endless. In keeping with their vast catalogue of releases, it could include a detailed booklet with synopsis, production notes, cast biographies, press items and an image gallery of stills and photos, as well as some relevant PDF material and a song only menu. As a bonus special feature, the release could also include a collection of Cliff and Olivia's duet performances and skits from It's Cliff Richard between 1970 and 1974. Can you imagine how amazing it would be to see such material scanned from the original camera negatives and extensively restored to their original television aspect ratio of 4.3? And even better to see it restored without any film dirt, damage, instability, warping and density fluctuation.

With thanks to Victor Rust, Juliette Iaciofano and Leo's Den Music