Movies: YOUNG BRITISH ACTOR MARKS FILM DEBUT WITH “BILLY LYNN'S LONG HALFTIME WALK”

British actor Joe Alwyn stars in one of the most anticipated movies of the year as he takes on the lead role in Oscar®-winning director Ang Lee's Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk. Joe was picked from obscurity to take on the title role of ‘Billy Lynn,' his feature film acting debut.

Based on the acclaimed bestselling novel by Ben Fountain, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk is told from the point of view of 19-year-old private Billy Lynn (newcomer Joe Alwyn) who, along with his fellow soldiers in Bravo Squad, becomes a hero after a harrowing Iraq battle and is brought home temporarily for a victory tour. Through flashbacks, culminating at the spectacular halftime show of the Thanksgiving Day football game, the film reveals what really happened to the squad – contrasting the realities of the war with America’s perceptions.

“This is obviously a huge transition for Joe and, I think, a huge discovery by Ang Lee,” says producer Stephen Cornwell. “Billy is the heart and soul of the film and I think the detail of Joe’s performance, the way that he lets you into his soul and the way you share his feelings, is extraordinary and profound. Joe’s freshness (he’s someone that an audience hasn’t seen before so he brings no baggage) and the subtlety and range of his performance encourage you to want to know Billy and, I think, ultimately feel for him.”

Lee, who has a knack for recognizing and nurturing new talent, had a very specific idea of the actor he needed for the title role and until he saw Alwyn, no other actor had fulfilled his requirements.

“I mean, it’s called ‘Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk,’ we needed him to carry the movie. It’s a coming of age story really, more than anything, a boy recognizes what his life is about, what he’s going to be. I really needed a compelling, soulful actor, one who, most importantly could blend innocence and sophistication because he starts as a naïve teenager and during the course of the film he becomes a man. We went through the regular casting process and my casting director Avy Kaufman is particularly good at finding new talents. Joe was still in school in London when we saw the tape he’d made. I was on my way from New York to Atlanta to make the movie, we’re already in pre-production so I wasn’t really going to see him but Avy said, ‘You have to, you have to.’ She’s done that to me quite a few times in the past and she’s always right. So I stayed a little longer in New York to meet with him. I remember it was a very cold morning, a Sunday. I saw this handsome young man standing outside of the building, freezing, definitely under dressed. I felt cold for him! And I met him, he read and that was that. It was immediate. Perhaps the best reading I have ever witnessed,” Lee says.

Joe Alwyn confides how “throughout the whole audition process it was hard to compute the scale of it—this being Ang Lee and such a huge project. So when I was flown to New York to meet and audition for Ang I didn’t feel particularly nervous because in my head it was something completely other and so big that it didn’t kind of compute. So yeah, it’s a big one, I guess, to take on for the first-ever job. Coming from drama school and not having done any film work before, it’s taken some adjustment to be acting in a way that does not incorporate the entire arc of a journey over a few hours, as you would in a play. Film work being so fragmented and broken down (which is so common and obvious to people who do it all the time) has definitely taken some getting used to, especially patching together the emotional continuity of the character, getting that all to make sense and really having where it all fits into place in your mind, especially since so much is recorded his point of view.”

Alwyn believes that “what is attractive about Billy is that he is this image of the all-American normal kid, which is why people try to turn him into what they want to project onto him, to mold him into what they can use him for. I also think of Billy as a rebel, but not too much the rebel, who is a bit on the outside, on the fringes and quite a solitary character who likes to get on with things by himself. I think he has leadership qualities, but I think he likes his solitude.”

Opening across the Philippines on November 09, “Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk” is distributed by Columbia Pictures, local office of Sony Pictures Releasing International.

Movies: VIN DIESEL INSPIRES FELLOW SOLDIERS IN “BILLY LYNN'S LONG HALFTIME WALK”

Action superstar Vin Diesel works under the direction of Oscar-winner Ang Lee for the first time in Columbia Pictures' emotionally charged film, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk.

Based on the acclaimed bestselling novel by Ben Fountain, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk is told from the point of view of 19-year-old private Billy Lynn (newcomer Joe Alwyn) who, along with his fellow soldiers in Bravo Squad, becomes a hero after a harrowing Iraq battle and is brought home temporarily for a victory tour. Through flashbacks, culminating at the spectacular halftime show of the Thanksgiving Day football game, the film reveals what really happened to the squad – contrasting the realities of the war with America’s perceptions.

Diesel plays Shroom, one of Billy's sergeants during his tour of duty. “In Iraq, Shroom became one of Billy's best friends,” shares Joe Alwyn.

“Shroom is written as a Zen kind of soldier who feels things deeply,” observes producer Marc Platt. “He’s a leader, he’s a thinker and a philosopher and has a compassionate warmth about him but he’s no nonsense at the same time. He’s literally the heart and soul of this unit. When I thought about who you’d believe as a Zen philosopher and as a soldier, a big bear of a guy to a group of these Bravos, I thought of Vin Diesel. It was a perfect marriage of an actor and a role. And fortunately for all of us Vin is an actor who loves film and filmmakers, and one of his heroes is Ang Lee. I reached out to Vin and he reached back to me and he said thank you for making my dreams come true. We love having him in the movie and we love that he gets to play a character close to his soul.”

“Shroom’s a very interesting and challenging character in the movie, because he is the older, wiser soldier warrior within this group of kids,” notes producer Stephen Cornwell. “The challenge of the role is to provide that quality of leadership and the sense of mysticism, and Vin’s a perfect fit. He brings acting skills and a presence that really makes that character come alive, which is very important to establish and by choosing to play Shroom, Vin was looking to do something different and very challenging. We’ve come to a very remote place in the world to film the scenes that establish Shroom’s position with the Bravos, and I think that Vin and Ang are having a fantastic time working together.”

Vin Diesel's upcoming films include xXx: Return of Zander Cage, Fast & Furious 8 and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2.

Opening across the Philippines on November 09, “Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk” is distributed by Columbia Pictures, local office of Sony Pictures Releasing International.

Movies: “BILLY LYNN'S LONG HALFTIME WALK” – FROM ACCLAIMED NOVEL TO THE BIG SCREEN

Based on the acclaimed bestselling novel by Ben Fountain, TriStar Pictures presents Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, from three-time Oscar®-winning director Ang Lee (Brokeback Mountain, Life of Pi).

Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk is told from the point of view of 19-year-old private Billy Lynn (newcomer Joe Alwyn) who, along with his fellow soldiers in Bravo Squad, becomes a hero after a harrowing Iraq battle and is brought home temporarily for a victory tour. Through flashbacks, culminating at the spectacular halftime show of the Thanksgiving Day football game, the film reveals what really happened to the squad – contrasting the realities of the war with America’s perceptions.

In his first major motion picture, Joe Alwyn plays Billy Lynn. Also starring are Kristen Stewart, Chris Tucker, Garrett Hedlund, Makenzie Leigh, with Vin Diesel, and Steve Martin.

“The genesis of the novel,” says novelist Ben Fountain, “ began in 2004 during a Cowboys Thanksgiving Day football game. This was three weeks after the general election when George W. Bush had beaten Kerry. I felt like I didn’t understand my country. Then, we had a bunch of people over at our house for Thanksgiving. We had the game on. Halftime comes and I’m sitting on the sofa. And everybody else gets up, ‘cause nobody watches the halftime show. But I stayed and started watching the halftime show—I mean really looking at it. And it’s very much the way I write it in the book: a surreal, pretty psychotic mash-up of American patriotism, exceptionalism, popular music, soft-core porn and militarism: lots of soldiers standing on the field with American flags and fireworks. I thought, this is the craziest thing I’ve ever seen. But everybody else was okay with it, the announcers on TV and everybody around, just another normal day in America. Since there were lots of soldiers in the field at that time, I wondered what it would be like to be a soldier who had been in combat who gets brought back to the US and dropped into this very artificial situation. What would that do to your head? I wanted the reader to feel like he or she is in Billy’s skin. And I think that’s what Ang’s trying to do too."

“Adapting the novel,” notes producer Stephen Cornwell, “was a big challenge. And like any adaptation, it evolved. One of the big questions was how to place Billy at the center of the story. How to find a way of creating this character whom, in the novel, engages the reader with his internal dialogue. How do you make that work cinematically? How do you place this character, his experiences, observations and point of view in the center of the story without resorting to narration, something we didn’t want to do. So as we adapted it, we went on a journey of trying to find the best way to express Billy’s point of view: how do you realize that first person experience in a cinematic context? How do you evolve cinematic language and the way we experience film in ways that allow us to get inside Billy’s head and go on this journey with him?”

Initially, it was Billy Lynn’s story that captivated director Ang Lee, his literal and emotional journey and the complicated juxtaposition of the glorification of returning war heroes and the horrific nature of the war they’ve fought. It was the kind of story that he thought lent itself to a new filmmaking approach he had been considering, one that could really connect the audience to Billy Lynn in an immersive, organic way, the cinematic equivalent of the first person, internal narrative of the book.

Ang Lee explains, “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk was a very compelling book. His observations of the absurdity of the over the top welcome home these warriors receive, the juxtaposition of this extravagant celebration of his heroism intercut with his battlefield service in Iraq, the irony of those two experiences side by side, it’s kind of an existential examination of what’s real and what’s not, there’s a sort of Zen quality to that comparison that fascinated me. I was attracted to the situation of the storytelling as well, the halftime show to celebrate the soldier in 2004 juxtaposed against the real battle – the drama, the conflict, a kind of coming of age story of a young soldier who has to sort it all out.”

Opening across the Philippines on November 09, “Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk” is distributed by Columbia Pictures, local office of Sony Pictures Releasing International.

Movie News: “BILLY LYNN'S LONG HALFTIME WALK” BREAKS NEW GROUND IN CINEMA EXPERIENCE

TriStar Pictures presents Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, the groundbreaking, cinematic event from three-time Oscar®-winning director Ang Lee.

With Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, Ang Lee redefines what is possible in filmmaking and storytelling with the goal of further engaging the audience in an advanced cinematic experience. Joined by two-time Oscar®-winning cinematographer John Toll, Lee employs state-of-the-art cameras to shoot in native 3D, high resolution and a history-making frame rate that seemed impossible until now. He creates a new way for audiences to experience drama, presenting the heightened sensations that young soldiers feel on the battlefield and the home front.

Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, based on the acclaimed bestselling novel by Ben Fountain, is told from the point of view of 19-year-old private Billy Lynn (newcomer Joe Alwyn) who, along with his fellow soldiers in Bravo Squad, becomes a hero after a harrowing Iraq battle and is brought home temporarily for a victory tour. Through flashbacks, culminating at the spectacular halftime show of the Thanksgiving Day football game, the film reveals what really happened to the squad – contrasting the realities of the war with America’s perceptions

“Since Life of Pi, I discovered that in making a 3D movie [we need to be] adding not only dimension, but a higher resolution that comes along with a much higher frame rate than we are used to having. The whole experience is not just about extravaganza, not just about action—but actually about drama as well. The way we look at things, the way we want the audience to engage in a movie I think is more personal. It's much more grand. I think the future is really exciting.”

In his first major motion picture, Joe Alwyn plays Billy Lynn. Also starring are Kristen Stewart, Chris Tucker, Garrett Hedlund, Makenzie Leigh, with Vin Diesel, and Steve Martin.

Produced by Marc Platt, Ang Lee, Rhodri Thomas, and Stephen Cornwell, and executive produced by Brian Bell, Jeff Robinov, Guo Guangchang, and Ben Waisbren. Jean-Christophe Castelli wrote the screenplay, based on the novel by Ben Fountain. Director of Photography is John Toll, ASC. Production designer is Mark Friedberg. Editor is Tim Squyres, ACE. Mychael Danna and Jeff Danna did the music for the film. Costume designer is Joseph G. Aulisi.

The running time is 1 hour and 52 minutes.

Opening across the Philippines on November 09, “Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk” is distributed by Columbia Pictures, local office of Sony Pictures Releasing International.