Rudderless following the death of his father in 2005 - his mother had died eight years earlier, at 47 - Cosmatos relocated to Vancouver in 2008 and began working on his first feature. It was here, in music, that the seeds for Mandy would be sown. He studied there until Grade 10, then switched to Mount Douglas Secondary for grades 11 and 12.Īfter high school, Cosmatos worked on graphic fanzines such as Dark Motel, and created the album art for several local bands, including Atlas Strategic and Daddy’s Hands. The family moved to Victoria in 1981 from Guadalajara, Mexico, and Cosmatos went to St. The house on Ten Mile Point was a den of movie-related artifacts and rare books, which Panos soaked up in a childhood that was anything but conventional.īorn in Rome, he’s a mixture of influences and ideologies: His mother, sculptor Birgitta Ljungberg, was Swedish, while his Greek father, an art collector as well as a filmmaker, spoke six languages. Cosmatos, was a Hollywood heavyweight who directed Sylvester Stallone in Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985) and Kurt Russell in Tombstone (1993). The director’s arresting visual style - part heavy metal, part acid trip - was developed over years of TV-watching and late-night movie screenings at his family’s house in Cadboro Bay. Academy Award nominations, for Jóhann Jóhannsson’s score and Hubert Pouille’s production design, are not out of the question. Mandy currently has a 93 per cent rating on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, which makes it one of the best-reviewed films of 2018. Clerks director Kevin Smith has described Mandy as “masterful f - ing filmmaking,” while Academy Award-winning director Guillermo del Toro tweeted: “Crazy. With a ramshackle Nicolas Cage in the lead role of Red Miller, a logger whose life is turned upside down when he runs into both a sex-cult leader and a murderous gang of drug-addled bikers, the film has been garnering rave reviews, the majority of which praise Cosmatos’s directorial flair and innovative script.Īt the Cannes Film Festival in May, Mandy received a four-minute standing ovation.
The film, which opens tonight at the Capitol 6, is a revenge flick gone amok, with some of the bloodiest scenes put to film this year.
The isolated existence of his childhood is played out in technicolour splendour in his latest film, Mandy. This is the Victoria that 44-year-old writer-director Panos Cosmatos grew up in. The majority of media that teens consumed came via Vancouver or Seattle radio stations, a few channels on TV and movies shown in a few local theatres. A-list concerts were few and far between, desirable albums at local record stores were expensive imports and video stores had so-so catalogues. If you happened to be a teenager living in a relatively remote location - such as an island off the west coast of Canada - in the early 1980s, life had a very small frame of reference.
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