Jordan Prosser
Jordan Prosser is a writer, filmmaker, and performer from Naarm/Melbourne, and a graduate of the VCA School of Film & Television. In 2022, he won the Peter Carey Short Story Award. His debut novel, Big Time, was published in 2024.
Where David Cronenberg’s body horrors of the 1980s and 1990s, such as Videodrome, The Fly, and Crash, were fascinating because of the fusion of technology and the human form, a new wave of genre films is anxiously asking: how much can we tweak and tinker before our bodies start to bite back? Like Theseus’s ship, how much can we swap out before nothing of our true self remains? Cosmetic surgery ... (read more)
In the opening shot of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation – one of the great opening shots in cinema – a slow, telescopic zoom scans the lunchtime crowd on a sunny day in San Francisco’s Union Square. As if by accident, the camera settles on Harry Caul (Gene Hackman), a middle-aged man in a grey raincoat whom we may not have even noticed if it weren’t for a busking mime sidling over ... (read more)
Public scandals are like modern-day myths that change shape and lose fidelity the more often they are repeated. They become copies of copies, grainier yet somehow grander, wholly untethered from their time and place of origin. They are also the lifeblood of much of our current entertainment landscape, in an age when lived experience counts as valuable IP, and the truth is merely content waiting to ... (read more)
Sofia Coppola’s films are suffused with the bittersweet inevitability of adolescence: a period of life that changes you irrevocably and comes with an in-built ending. Anyone who has studied History at high school knows the outcome of Marie Antoinette (2006). In The Virgin Suicides (1999), it’s right there in the title. This sense of languid doom has never been more apparent than in Coppola’s ... (read more)
The holidays are fast approaching, which means it’s time for Hollywood A-listers to adopt thick accents (and don even thicker prosthetics) to re-enact the lives of historical celebrities in the pursuit of awards season glory. This year alone, we have had Oppenheimer and Napoleon and are staring down the barrel of Ferrari, Priscilla, Rustin, and Bob Marley: One Love, each promising to grapple wit ... (read more)
Jordan Prosser reviews 'Cast Mates: Australian actors in Hollywood and at home' by Sam Twyford-Moore
A confession: I was a child actor. Never a child star, although certainly that was the intention. For years I endured the three-hour drive from Canberra to Sydney, preparing for my five-minute meeting with some Surry Hills casting director, whose first question would inevitably be ‘How’s your American accent?’ The zenith of my career was a thirty-second commercial for the orange-flavoured so ... (read more)
Writer–director Christopher Nolan is locked in an ongoing, well-documented wrestling match with linear time. With each new film, he attempts to find some unique way of slicing, dicing, and interrogating it. Memento (2000) gave us a crime thriller told entirely out of order; Inception (2010) used an ingenious nesting-doll conceit for its thrilling dream heists; Interstellar (2014) dabbled in rela ... (read more)
It’s an old adage but an accurate one – making a movie is like going to war, with an army of strangers enduring endless hardship for the sake of a common goal. Hollywood legend Tom Hanks is an expert on both films and warfare, having made his fair share of one about the other, and his first novel, The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece (following his bestselling 2017 short stor ... (read more)
When you wake up from a nightmare, it can feel so vivid, so real – so relevant. But over the following minutes and hours, your brain undertakes the important task of synthesising what your subconscious has subjected you to; it interprets symbols, recognises familiar anxieties, and likely suggests that you refrain from boring everyone you encounter that day with a blow-by-blow account of it all. ... (read more)