“I’d just finished the [Jason] Statham picture [‘Redemption‘], which was very conventional. And the whole process just made me think to look again at the basics of what the job is: get a load of people into a room, turn off the lights and get them to watch a screen for 90 minutes, and how many other ways there are, without using all the tricks that normally go with a film,” writer/director Steven Knight told us at the Göteborg International Film Festival earlier this month. “And that meant it needed to be one person and I think Tom is the best actor we’ve got, so when he was interested, I wrote the script knowing that he was going to be in it. The whole thing was all quite odd and very quick, we met in November, wrote it over Christmas and shot it in February.” And after premiering at the Venice Film Festival last year, the movie is now headed to theaters.
Tom Hardy leads the way — and is the only one on screen — in “Locke,” a drama/thriller about a regular working stiff named Ivan Locke trying to keep his life together over one drive, while talking to the people in his life — voiced by Olivia Colman, Ruth Wilson and Andrew Scott — over the phone. And the result is very, very good movie that does a lot with very little. “It’s a very complete portrait of a man — one who can be commanding, weak, funny, loving, cold, single-minded, selfless and selfish — and by the end of the drive you feel like you’ve known Ivan for years,” we wrote in our review out of Venice.
And you can get to know Ivan yourself when “Locke” opens on April 25th.
