Careless whispers: what really happened between George Michael and Lindsay Anderson? The Wham! movie producer reveals all

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How did the pioneering director get involved – then fall out – with the 80s’ poppiest band? How are Sam Peckinpah and Michael Jackson’s Thriller involved? Prepare for a tale of ambition, deception and shuttlecock-stuffed shorts When Wham! squashed Lindsay Anderson’s China film Andrew Ridgeley on Wham’s surreal trip to China It was the evening of 3 April 1985 in a hotel in Hong Kong. Lindsay Anderson, who I’d engaged to direct the theatrical documentary I’d instigated of Wham!’s historic trip to China, had called a meeting of the film crew. He wanted to give a pep talk the night before we flew to Beijing. The 30-strong team my production company had recruited for this adventure duly assembled. Lindsay gave a speech in the stentorian tones of an elder statesman addressing the House of Commons and rooted in Henry V’s St Crispin’s Day oration. And typical Lindsay, he mixed shrewd observation with sardonic wit. “Tomorrow we embark on a great adventure,” he said. “We travel into communist Ch...
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‘Life can be complicated’: Rachel Weisz on balancing privacy with stardom

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Her latest TV series calls for her to play both twins in a reworking of Cronenberg’s dark and bloody classic, Dead Ringers. But Rachel Weisz, the famously private Oscar-winner, is used to stepping in and out of roles

There’s quite a lot of blood. There’s really quite a lot of blood in Dead Ringers, but it’s not the blood of bullet holes or stab wounds, or any of the other violences one might expect in a dark psychological thriller like this. It’s blood on knickers and operating tables, and smeared on silk shirts, and the blood as a baby’s head crowns – the bloods of birth and loss, guttural screams, and in the middle of it all, Rachel Weisz, twice.

In David Cronenberg’s original 1988 film, a grisly examination of the relationship between the physical and mental self, Jeremy Irons played twin gynaecologists whose dubious ethics led to all manner of horrors. In this gender-swapped adaptation, in which Weisz stars and exec-produced, she plays those twins identical in every way but character. Dr Beverly Mantle is the shy moral introvert, whose love affair with a patient triggers a psychic unravelling between the sisters, while Elliot is a modern mad scientist, hungry for meat, drugs, conflict, godliness, sex. What could come off as a soapy trick, in Weisz’s Oscar-winning hands becomes camply surreal, uncanny, seductive, a little perverse – joy.

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