Layer Cake final version
Content
By Emily Outterside
• Year of release - 2004 • Director - Matthew Vaughn • Production Companys - Sony Pictures Entertainment & Marv Films. • Budget - £4,000,000 • Worldwide Gross - $11,850,214
Plot Summary
• The film centers on a cocaine distributor played by Daniel Craig. The character, who also narrates the film, is deliberately unnamed throughout, but is listed in the credits as "XXXX". XXXX has established a successful business in London buying, cutting and selling cocaine while avoiding the largesse and gangster behaviour associated with drug dealing. Having made his fortune, he secretly plans to retire from the business for good.
Cast
• • • • • • • Daniel Craig - XXXX Colm Meaney - Gene Kenneth Cranham - Jimmy Price Michael Gambon - Eddie Temple Sienna Miller - Tammy George Harris - Morty Jamie Foreman - The Duke
Awards/Nominations
• 8 Nominations • • • • • • • • Most Promising Newcomer (Matthew Vaughn) Douglas Hickox Award (Matthew Vaughn) Empire Best British Actor (Daniel Craig) Empire Best British Film Empire Best Newcomer (Matthew Vaughn) Empire Best Newcomer (Sienna Miller) Audience Award Best Actor (Daniel Craig) World Soundtrack Award (Discovery of the Year)
• 3 Wins • • Special Recognition (2 Awards For Excellence in Film Making) Empire Best British Director (Matthew Vaughn)
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"Daniel Craig in a star making performance...a dense, wild, and convulsive British gangster thriller that gets at something you rarely see outside The Sopranos: the anxiety of those who live by spilled blood." -Owen Gleiberman, ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY"Britain's latest brain-teasing crime caper...fast, clever fun with a terrific sense of style." -Karen Durbin, ELLE"A much better film than anything Ritchie has done. . . Craig is nothing less than mesmerizing as a coke dealer trying to take his profits and head for retirement. The supporting cast, led by Colm Meaney as one of many characters with Runyonesque nicknames, is superb as well." -Roger Friedman, Foxnews.com"A new breed of criminal...the dialogue is slick, the plot is twisting and the characters are eccentric." AINT IT COOL NEWS
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Matthew Vaughn (Director/Producer)
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Matthew started his career in 1996 as a producer with The Innocent Sleep, a thriller starring Michael Gambon and Rupert Graves. He set up Ska Films with director Guy Ritchie in 1997 and the following year made Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, which took in excess of £11m in the UK alone, becoming one of the most successful British films of the decade. This was followed by the diamond heist movie, Snatch, (2000) with Brad Pitt, Benicio Del Toro and Jason Statham. Snatch opened to great acclaim, taking £3 million in the UK in its opening weekend (the largest ever opening for an 18 certificate film) and £12 million total UK box office. The film went on to accrue $100 million worldwide. In 2002 Vaughn produced Mean Machine, a remake of the 1974 Burt Reynolds classic The Longest Yard, starring Vinnie Jones and Jason Statham followed by Swept Away starring Madonna and Adrianno Giannini and directed by Guy Ritchie. Layer Cake marks his directorial debut.
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"The Layer Cake is a metaphor for different levels of British society, whether it's the crime world or anything else", says director Matthew Vaughn. "The movie's about showing how drugs are everywhere and it doesn't matter who or where you are, you're only one person away from drugs, scoring drugs or being involved with criminals. There's a speech at the end of the film where someone uses Layer Cake as a metaphor for life and how you go up and up and up from one layer of the cake and to the next. Matthew Vaughn first met Layer Cake writer J.J. Connolly on a train to Belgium. "I was going to watch the England v Germany football match at Euro 2000, four years ago," he remembers. "I was sitting next to a guy and I asked him what do you do and he says, 'I write...'" As soon as he got back to England, Vaughn got hold of a copy of Connolly's book. "I thought it was brilliant, I could not put it down," he says. "We just sat down with John [Connolly] and said, 'You know, we can't let anybody else make a movie out of this, it's too good'. According to Connolly the idea for his book came from "watching a lot of people getting it very wrong. Treating criminal businessmen as total idiots, only very stupid people think criminals are stupid. "If you read the book you'll see that there's an enormous jump from book to script," says Reid. "We cut masses out and amalgamated so much stuff because it was important to take a step sideways, a specific step away from the two films we've done before." And of course, the biggest step was Matthew Vaughn's switch from producer to director. It wasn't a leap he originally intended to make.
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• Layer cake portrays the high side of the drug business e.g. money and power and the main character ‘XXXX’ believes himself to be a legitimate businessman. Which perhaps can be seen as a bad portrayal of the business they are in, glamorizing it. • Many of the Characters are very stereotypical southerners, cockney characters, and characters like ‘XXXX’ who is a higher class with an English accent that would appeal to audiences in the US etc.
• Year of release - 2004 • Director - Matthew Vaughn • Production Companys - Sony Pictures Entertainment & Marv Films. • Budget - £4,000,000 • Worldwide Gross - $11,850,214
Plot Summary
• The film centers on a cocaine distributor played by Daniel Craig. The character, who also narrates the film, is deliberately unnamed throughout, but is listed in the credits as "XXXX". XXXX has established a successful business in London buying, cutting and selling cocaine while avoiding the largesse and gangster behaviour associated with drug dealing. Having made his fortune, he secretly plans to retire from the business for good.
Cast
• • • • • • • Daniel Craig - XXXX Colm Meaney - Gene Kenneth Cranham - Jimmy Price Michael Gambon - Eddie Temple Sienna Miller - Tammy George Harris - Morty Jamie Foreman - The Duke
Awards/Nominations
• 8 Nominations • • • • • • • • Most Promising Newcomer (Matthew Vaughn) Douglas Hickox Award (Matthew Vaughn) Empire Best British Actor (Daniel Craig) Empire Best British Film Empire Best Newcomer (Matthew Vaughn) Empire Best Newcomer (Sienna Miller) Audience Award Best Actor (Daniel Craig) World Soundtrack Award (Discovery of the Year)
• 3 Wins • • Special Recognition (2 Awards For Excellence in Film Making) Empire Best British Director (Matthew Vaughn)
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"Daniel Craig in a star making performance...a dense, wild, and convulsive British gangster thriller that gets at something you rarely see outside The Sopranos: the anxiety of those who live by spilled blood." -Owen Gleiberman, ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY"Britain's latest brain-teasing crime caper...fast, clever fun with a terrific sense of style." -Karen Durbin, ELLE"A much better film than anything Ritchie has done. . . Craig is nothing less than mesmerizing as a coke dealer trying to take his profits and head for retirement. The supporting cast, led by Colm Meaney as one of many characters with Runyonesque nicknames, is superb as well." -Roger Friedman, Foxnews.com"A new breed of criminal...the dialogue is slick, the plot is twisting and the characters are eccentric." AINT IT COOL NEWS
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•
•
Matthew Vaughn (Director/Producer)
•
Matthew started his career in 1996 as a producer with The Innocent Sleep, a thriller starring Michael Gambon and Rupert Graves. He set up Ska Films with director Guy Ritchie in 1997 and the following year made Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, which took in excess of £11m in the UK alone, becoming one of the most successful British films of the decade. This was followed by the diamond heist movie, Snatch, (2000) with Brad Pitt, Benicio Del Toro and Jason Statham. Snatch opened to great acclaim, taking £3 million in the UK in its opening weekend (the largest ever opening for an 18 certificate film) and £12 million total UK box office. The film went on to accrue $100 million worldwide. In 2002 Vaughn produced Mean Machine, a remake of the 1974 Burt Reynolds classic The Longest Yard, starring Vinnie Jones and Jason Statham followed by Swept Away starring Madonna and Adrianno Giannini and directed by Guy Ritchie. Layer Cake marks his directorial debut.
•
•
•
•
•
"The Layer Cake is a metaphor for different levels of British society, whether it's the crime world or anything else", says director Matthew Vaughn. "The movie's about showing how drugs are everywhere and it doesn't matter who or where you are, you're only one person away from drugs, scoring drugs or being involved with criminals. There's a speech at the end of the film where someone uses Layer Cake as a metaphor for life and how you go up and up and up from one layer of the cake and to the next. Matthew Vaughn first met Layer Cake writer J.J. Connolly on a train to Belgium. "I was going to watch the England v Germany football match at Euro 2000, four years ago," he remembers. "I was sitting next to a guy and I asked him what do you do and he says, 'I write...'" As soon as he got back to England, Vaughn got hold of a copy of Connolly's book. "I thought it was brilliant, I could not put it down," he says. "We just sat down with John [Connolly] and said, 'You know, we can't let anybody else make a movie out of this, it's too good'. According to Connolly the idea for his book came from "watching a lot of people getting it very wrong. Treating criminal businessmen as total idiots, only very stupid people think criminals are stupid. "If you read the book you'll see that there's an enormous jump from book to script," says Reid. "We cut masses out and amalgamated so much stuff because it was important to take a step sideways, a specific step away from the two films we've done before." And of course, the biggest step was Matthew Vaughn's switch from producer to director. It wasn't a leap he originally intended to make.
•
• •
•
•
• Layer cake portrays the high side of the drug business e.g. money and power and the main character ‘XXXX’ believes himself to be a legitimate businessman. Which perhaps can be seen as a bad portrayal of the business they are in, glamorizing it. • Many of the Characters are very stereotypical southerners, cockney characters, and characters like ‘XXXX’ who is a higher class with an English accent that would appeal to audiences in the US etc.
