It’s Valentine’s Day in Los Angeles, and Victoria Monét is starting her morning with someone she loves: herself. The 26-year-old singer and songwriter is hitting the gym with her personal trainer Omar Bolden, a former NFL star who was part of the Denver Broncos team that won the Super Bowl in 2016. You need that sort of scarily top-level fitness when you’ve got the schedule Monét has: already a Grammy-nominated songwriter after co-writing the global hit “7 Rings” with her longtime collaborator Ariana Grande, she’s currently preparing to release her own solo project Jaguar this spring. “I’m starting off V Day right with some self love!” she bubbles excitedly post-workout. “It’s hard to keep track of everything when you travel. I just got home last night so I was excited to get back in the gym.”

Continue reading at Notion.

It’s hard to go more than a few feet in Austin without spotting a sign or bumper sticker imploring you to ‘Keep Austin Weird’. It may be the capital of Texas, but this thriving and diverse city of nearly one million people has dedicated itself to providing an artistic and cultural alternative to the state’s mainstream. Walking around town you’ll spot statues of local heroes such as Willie Nelson and Stevie Ray Vaughan, while cult musician Daniel Johnston’s mural of Jeremiah the innocent frog – always asking: ‘Hi, How Are You?’ – has become a local icon. It’s also an easy destination to reach from the UK, with airlines including British Airways, Norwegian and American Airlines all offering direct flights from London, as well as many more options connecting through nearby Dallas-Fort Worth.

Continue reading at ABTA Magazine.

Cover story for Notion 84.

High above the north shore of Big Bear Lake, Amber Woodyard, a local guide, stands on one of her favourite trails. The air is fresh, clean and cool, scented by the pine forest that sweeps downhill toward the still, blue water. The view is breathtaking: in the distance, she points out the contours of Mount San Gorgonio, known locally as Old Greyback, the highest peak in Southern California. In the foreground the heavily forested hillsides look much the same as they would have done to this land’s early explorers. But the most remarkable thing about the view is not so much what we can see as what we can’t: a freeway. Take a look in any direction, and from here, it’s hard to believe that the bad-tempered, traffic-clogged arteries of Los Angeles are even on the same planet, never mind less than 100km away. I can’t hear a thing.

“The wilderness is what attracts people here,” says Woodyard, as her dog, Carly, scampers around her well-worn hiking boots. “It’s just so beautiful, and yet so close to LA. Where else in the world can you wake up by the beach and be up in the mountains in the afternoon?”

Continue reading at Atlas by Etihad.

Lucky Pathiniya Durage remembers the exact moment he first saw someone surfing. He was nine years old, and he was with his aunty going to the vegetable market in the tiny fishing village of Midigama, on the south-west curve of the teardrop-shaped island nation of Sri Lanka. The market looked out to sea at a spot where a mellow left hand wave breaks over a deep reef. As Lucky watched, he saw a man on a board riding the wave towards the shore. At that moment, something inside him changed forever. Thirty-three years later, sat in the warm sun outside the Lion’s Rest Hotel, his eyes light up at the memory. “I just had this feeling inside me,” he says. “I knew I wanted to do this.”

Of course, in those days there was no surfing scene in Sri Lanka. This was long before surf schools, yoga retreats or the Lion’s Rest Hotel started appearing along this palm-fringed paradise coast. Lucky would learn later that the man he’d seen surfing – who turned out, predictably, to be an Australian – had been staying at a local home, sleeping on the floor.

That simplicity didn’t deter Sri Lanka’s early surf pioneers. By the following year, Europeans, Australians and Japanese visitors were all coming to surf Coconut Point, near Lucky’s village. He would watch them intently, still determined to surf himself. Soon he resolved that there was nothing else for it. He would take matters into his own hands. “My friend and I decided we should try to make our own surfboard,” he remembers. “We decided to cut it out of a big tree. It took nearly two months to get it right. When we first went in with it, the foreigners were looking at us like, ‘What are they doing? Crazy boys!’”

The board was a long way from perfect. Lucky and his friend would get splinters in their stomachs until they learned to tie sponge to the surface with fishing line. After growing weary of constantly having to chase after the board when it got away from them they made themselves a leash using an old saline drip from the local hospital. All of it was worth it to get Lucky closer to his dream. “I was always in the ocean, always,” he says. “I knew where all the reefs were, and where the shallows were.”

That knowledge came in handy. One day he tried to warn an Italian couple not to go into the sea in a dangerous spot. Unable to understand his broken English, they went in anyway and soon the woman was being dragged under by a powerful current. Lucky chased after her through the shallow water he knew so well and pulled her to safety. He was still only 10 years old. It was around then people started calling him ‘Lucky’.

Nowadays, Lucky has achieved his dream of making his living from surfing. He is one of the few local Sri Lankans to be a qualified International Surfing Association instructor. “I’m always smiling,” he says. “Doing this makes me very happy. I see a lot of teachers who get angry with their students, but I don’t like that. I want to encourage them and give them confidence.”

As well as his own surf school, Lucky also offers lessons in conjunction with the Lion’s Rest Hotel – which looks out over Coconut Point, the same spot where he first started teaching himself to surf three decades ago. As we sit outside on the terrace we can hear the gentle, rhythmic sound of waves crashing on the beach. In front of the hotel, cows chew the cud as they stand about idly on the cricket pitch while colourful tuk tuks buzz down narrow sandy alleyways. To hear Lucky tell it, there’s no better place on earth to surf. “Sri Lanka has warm water,” he points out, astutely. “Europe is very cold, so you have to wear a wetsuit. Also, there are many surf breaks here so they don’t get too busy. And the King Coconut is native here. Did you ever drink a fresh coconut on the beach just after you finished surfing? That’s a very good feeling.”

It’s not just locals like Lucky who’ve fallen head over heels off a wave for Sri Lanka’s idyllic conditions. People come to experience them from all over the world. South African Jelaine Hermitte is an instructor who’s spent the last two years working here on the southern coast. She argues that it’s the perfect spot for people who want to learn to surf. “The waves are very friendly here and quite soft, which is perfect for beginners,” she says, drip-drying herself just a few feet from Weligama Beach. “You don’t get super powerful waves here like you do in Indonesia, for example, so it’s a great place to learn and build up your confidence. The whole place has a typical laidback island vibe: surfing, shorts and T-shirts, huts, coconuts, turtles and warm waves. What more could you ask for?”

Indeed, part of the attraction of Sri Lanka is that unlike many surf destinations there’s a lot happening on dry land as well. There is plenty of charm to stumble across on your journey – as befits the country which the ancient Persians referred to as ‘Serendip’, from which we get the word ‘serendipity’.

Whether it’s spotting elephants in Udawalawe National Park or waking up early to experience the buzz of Mirissa Fish Market, where tuna, hammerhead sharks and even manta rays line the docks, the wild variety of the natural world is always close at hand. Alternatively, you can spend time rejuvenating your body with an holistic massage conducted within in the ocean itself by Franco Rebagliati, the experienced surfer and masseuse who runs You Are The Sea. For many who come to Sri Lanka, the most natural companion to surfing is yoga. After all, assuming cobra pose will prepare you for perfectly for lying on a surfboard, while warrior pose isn’t a million miles from how you need to stand to successfully ride a wave.

A few minutes drive by tuk tuk from Lion’s Rest is Camp Poe, which offers simple safari tent lodging, meditative murals, a secluded pool and daily yoga and surf lessons. Sitting near the still blue water, yoga instructor Jessyca Eve Canizales explains why Sri Lanka stands out among the many yoga destinations she’s visited. “I think the melting pot of cultures here is really interesting,” she says. “The food is really remarkable, especially for a vegan or vegetarian lifestyle because it’s all tropical fruit and vegetables. People really appreciate you being here. It’s such a smiley place and I feel it’s safe for my children. I find there’s a reverence for the philosophy of buddhism here, a code of living, which extends beyond people’s specific religious beliefs. It’s a warm and textured place to be.”

For my own first ever surf lesson, I head 30 miles east of Weligama Beach to meet Steve Taylor of Tropicsurf. An Australian from Melbourne who like Lucky has been surfing since he was 10, he was attracted to living and working in Sri Lanka in part because his mother is from the island. He is based out of the Anantara Peace Haven resort in Tangalle, a five-star hotel sat on a rocky outcrop which offers the chance to stay in beautifully secluded villas that come complete with private pools.

Steve, however, has something more challenging in mind than a dip in an infinity pool. It doesn’t take him long to size me up. “Can you swim?” he asks seriously soon after we meet. “You have to be able to swim. My only rules are no life jackets…” his stony demeanour cracks into a cheeky grin “…and no budgie smugglers.”

We set off to find the perfect spot in an air-conditioned van, our surf boards following behind strapped to the roof of a tuk tuk. We pass down unassuming lanes past shacks with grass roofs until we find a deserted beach. The only thing keeping us company is a solitary cow on the beach who enjoys licking the saltwater off our boards. As far as the eye can see, we have the ocean to ourselves. “Surfing is about freedom,” Steve says. “You’re getting out amongst nature, and best of all nobody can get on their damn phones while they’re surfing!”

Lying on the beach, Steve guides me through the basics of how I’m going to stand myself up: arms out like chicken wings, leg crooked like a lizard, then popping up to standing. Before I know it, I’m out at sea, riding my first wave. An hour later, back on the shore, Steve has a serendipitous surprise for me. He cracks open a King Coconut as my reward and hands it to me to drink. Lucky was right. It’s a very good feeling.

Published in Atlas by Etihad, November 2018.

The first thing I notice as I step off the plane is the desert heat. On average, Phoenix has 299 days of sunshine every year, while nearby Yuma is not just the sunniest place in the United States, but actually holds the world record for average annual sunshine: an incredible 4,300 hours of sun each year.

The heat and light make up not only the city’s climate, but its character. It was the temperature that drew the celebrated architect Frank Lloyd Wright to Phoenix. He first arrived in 1928 to work as a consultant on the Arizona Biltmore hotel, and returned a decade later, after his doctor told him that the weather would benefit his health, to build Taliesin West, his winter home, school and studio.

Taliesin West remains open to visitors, even though it still operates as one of the best architecture schools in the United States. Taking the guided tour of the school is an excellent route to understanding how Wright built his reputation as one of America’s great architects, and in particular to appreciating his ability to bring the outdoors inside. Sunlight streams into the drafting room where Wright drew up plans for his most famous work, the Guggenheim Museum in New York, and where students continue to work and learn from his example.

If they need further inspiration, the Phoenix Art Museum is a good place to start: the gallery sprawls over 26,500 square metres, and houses work dating from the Renaissance right up to the modern day. Highlights include a portrait of George Washington by Gilbert Stuart, modernist work by Georgia O’Keeffe and Anish Kapoor’s acclaimed sculpture Upside Down, Inside Out.

Even the greatest artwork struggles to compete with the majesty of the natural landscapes that lie on the doorstep, however. As I head out into the desert, I feel as if I have arrived in the Wild West of my childhood fantasies: giant saguaro cactuses dot the land, instantly familiar from cowboy films.

Saguaro grows an average of a foot per decade, so those that climb to 20 or 30 feet will have been standing on that same spot for around 250 years. It is easy to picture yourself as one of the early pioneers – although it is worth bearing in mind that widescreen depictions may not have been wholly accurate. In John Ford’s Three Godfathers, John Wayne finds himself stranded in the Arizona desert and hacks open a barrelhead cactus in order to drink the watery pulp. In reality, it would be so full of acids you would be likely to become very ill, so don’t forget your water bottle.

Of course, no visit to Arizona would be complete without paying a visit to the Grand Canyon. Entry to the national park – a three-and-a-half hour drive north of Phoenix – costs £24 per vehicle, a tiny price to pay for the majesty that awaits.

It is hard to describe the experience of standing on the cusp of The Abyss, the name given to one of the canyon’s many look-out points. What is remarkable is not just the size and scale of the canyon, but also the swathe of history it illuminates. It has been six million years since the Colorado River first found its way to the Gulf of California and began working its way down through the dirt and rock. The river now runs more than 1,500 metres below the Grand Canyon’s rim.

There are two very different ways of experiencing the Grand Canyon. One is to hike down into it. The most popular route, the Bright Angel Trail, descends 1,370 metres to the Colorado River, which means you have got to climb all the way back up. The other, rather more leisurely way to get inside the canyon is by helicopter. Maverick Helicopters depart from the airport near the small town of Tusayan, on the south side of the park, and 40-minute flights start from £140.

From the vantage point the flights provide, it is possible to see as far as the Painted Desert and to follow the river before diving through the Dragon Corridor, the widest and deepest part of the canyon. The most heart-stopping moment, however, is early on, when you are flying 15 metres above the Ponderosa pine treeline, and then suddenly there is nothing beneath you except the rushing waters almost a mile below.

But to visit Arizona and only see Phoenix and the Grand Canyon is to barely scratch the state’s surface. To the east of the National Park is the incredibly photogenic Horseshoe Bend, where the curve of the river has carved out a spectacular landmark. Nearby is Antelope Canyon, a narrow and now dry slot canyon, which creates an otherworldly landscape for visitors. Inside the canyon, photographers jostle for position, no surprise considering the world’s most expensive photograph was taken here: Peter Lik sold Phantom, an image of dust in the canyon appearing to take the form of a ghost, for $6.5m in November 2014.

Improbably, Arizona is also home to a burgeoning wine scene. Despite the heat, vineyards have sprouted up in the Verde Valley, near Sedona, and the food and wine being produced here is almost as spectacular as the red rock formations that loom over the town.

With all this and so much more to explore, and with direct flights already taking off from London, it looks like it’s time to get to Phoenix.

Cover story for ABTA Magazine, July 2018.

Early in his career, David Merlini learned that one of the benefits of being an escape artist is not having to worry when you’re stopped by the police. It was the mid-90s, and he had just bought his first car, a silver Maserati. Not bad for a 17-year-old in Budapest. There was just one minor problem: he didn’t have a driving licence. So he came up with a ruse. Whenever he got pulled over, he’d say that his license was in the boot. When they popped it open it would be full of chains and padlocks.

“What are you doing with all these?” they’d demand.

“I’m an escape artist.”

“Is that right? Could you escape from my handcuffs?”

They’d snap on their police-issue cuffs and moments later Merlini would hand the bracelets back to them. By this point, they’d have invariably forgotten all about needing to see his licence. As if by magic.

Yet there is no trickery in this story. They were real policeman with real handcuffs, and Merlini really wrestled free of them. Even Merlini’s name is real, and appears on the driving licence he’s rather belatedly acquired.

Teller, the shorter half of Penn & Teller, once told Esquire magazine that: “Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect.” Merlini knows that to be true. He has spent his whole life learning to escape.

Merlini was born in Budapest on 31 October 1978 to an Italian father and a Hungarian mother. They knew something was different about their son by the time he reached the age of four. He showed no interest in Matchbox cars, Lego or football. The only toys he wanted to play with were padlocks and handcuffs. His only passion was for magic. Not long after, his father moved the family to Turin in northern Italy. Coincidentally, the city is home to the biggest society of European magicians: The Circolo Amici della Magia di Torino. A chance meeting with one of its founders led to Merlini joining the club when he was just 13, after an examination period of six months. He was the youngest member ever admitted.

It was in their library of magic that Merlini made a discovery that changed his life. He began to read about the life of Harry Houdini, the greatest escape artist of all. Here was a man who had shared Merlini’s love for combining magic with padlocks and handcuffs. What’s more, both men had been born in Budapest – one district away from each other – but left Hungary as young children. Houdini had died at the age of 52 on 31 October 1926. Exactly 52 years later, Merlini had been born. “Then and there it was decided,” says Merlini. “I will stage again all of his illusions, all of his escapes, but with a modern key. I will modernise these amazing escapes that he performed.”

He didn’t waste any time. Merlini made his first public appearance at the age of 14, in the theatre tent of Budapest’s Sziget festival. Just two years later, he was upside down over the main stage at the same festival escaping from a straitjacket while suspended by his feet from a burning rope. It was a variation on a trick Houdini himself had performed outside newspaper offices to guarantee himself press coverage, and it had a similar effect for Merlini. “In 1995 in Hungary it was something that had never been seen before,” he remembers. “There was massive media attention, which fuelled my passion. I made a statement that every year I would present a new stunt, something amazing. The year after I was locked in a steel box and lowered into the Danube river.”

Quickly succeeding in his goal to recreate Houdini’s escapes, Merlini then raised the stakes even higher. “Escape artists all do the same gigs. They get chained, they escape,” he explains. “I always wanted to create something of my own.”

The first show he devised himself was performed in Budapest’s Hero’s Square in 2001. Merlini was strapped in a regulation straitjacket and then welded into a steel and reinforced glass container filled with water. The water was then frozen, and 33 hours later the one ton ice block was melted with chainsaws and flame-throwers. Merlini then staggered out and escaped from the straitjacket. After that, the stunts got bigger every year. One year he was embedded in a block of concrete and lowered into the Danube. The next he was launched inside the largest non-governmental non-military rocket every commissioned by an individual. “After I was launched in the rocket, I said: ‘What else can I do?’” he laughs.

His answer to that was to be named Best Escape Artist at the World Magic Awards in Los Angeles in 2007. He picked up the award after performing a variation on his ice block escape where he was instantly frozen with liquid nitrogen. Two years later, on the starting grid before a Formula 1 race in Bahrain, he broke the world record for the longest breath-hold underwater with a staggering time of 21 minutes and 29 seconds.

The trick with Merlini is that there is no trick. “A magician creates an illusion by, for example, using the dice to roll a certain number, and maybe the dice is prepped, and the trick is possible because of an apparatus,” he says. “On the other hand, the escape artist is the apparatus itself. The secret behind my escapes is how to hold your breath, how to open locks underwater, how to resist very uncomfortable and harsh conditions. It wouldn’t be right to say it’s trickery, because the trick is the man itself.”

Having performed all over the world, Merlini returned to Budapest to open The House of Houdini last year. An apartment in Buda Castle has been transformed into a shrine to Merlini’s hero. Handcuffs and lock-picks that once belonged to the great escape artist, as well as his old family bible inscribed with his birth name Erik Weisz, sit side by side with props from a recent Houdini television series starring Adrien Brody, for which Merlini taught him the basics of escapology. There are also regular magic shows, every half an hour, literally providing a stage for a new generation of young Hungarian illusionists.

Before it opened, there was nothing to mark Houdini in the city of his birth. Merlini couldn’t allow that to continue. “Houdini is still an icon,” he says. “The museum is here because I hope he will still be an icon in 100 years, because that’s what he deserves. He had the class and the straight-forward style all mixed in one. He was unique. We have amazing magicians again today who are very successful, but I doubt if in 100 years there will be many names still up for future generations.”

Merlini and Houdini capture the imagination because in escaping from the ties that bound them, they represent something essential in the human condition. The French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau once wrote that: “Man is born free, but is everywhere in chains.” Houdini and those who’ve followed him show us that we can throw them off. “We all have our manacles and our chains,” says Merlini. “It’s just a question of how we can escape from them.”

Published by Brussels Airlines’ b inspired, July 2017.

Guatemala is one of the most dangerous places in the world to be a woman. According to a 2012 report by the Small Arms Survey, the small Central American country has the third highest rate of femicide – women being killed just for being women – in the world, behind El Salvador and Jamaica. During the Guatemalan Civil War, which lasted from 1960 to 1996, rape was used as a weapon of war against women. Perpetrators of gender-based violence in Guatemala often quite literally get away with murder, bolstered by a “machismo” culture that treats women as objects. Amnesty International has called on the state to do more to protect women.

This cultural backdrop makes it even more remarkable that for the last 19 years, Guatemala has also been home to a proudly feminist free newspaper called La Cuerda (The Cord). First published on 8 March 1998, International Women’s Day, it has been distributed monthly across the country ever since and has given a voice to women who would otherwise have been ignored.

In Antigua, in the south of the country, I met one of the newspaper’s four founders, Ana Cofiño, at her home to ask her about the challenges they’ve faced and her hopes for planting the seeds of Guatemalan feminism:

How did La Cuerda first get started?

“Before we started La Cuerda there was another daily journal, and we asked the editor to give us a page when the moon was full. Every full moon we had a page. It was four of us, friends, and we had meetings where we would decide what we would write about. After that finished, my colleagues and I shared the dream of having our own paper. “A room of our own”, as Virginia Woolf put it. We were writing for other magazines, but we wanted to have a paper that belonged to us. If you just put one article in a big magazine it gets lost. We wanted to start a magazine which said: ‘We are feminists and this is our position’. What we tried to do from the beginning with this newspaper was to open society to what women were thinking, doing and feeling. We wanted women to know each other, because war breaks everything. Our social fabric had been broken during the war.”

Where did your idea of feminism come from?

“We should define what we mean by feminism. Feminism is a philosophical theory. It’s also an economic proposal. It’s a way of living. It’s not like machismo. It’s not stupid actions. It’s an accumulation of knowledge and political changes done by feminism. That’s what we inherited. It’s theory written by feminists, and the story of women. That’s one part of it. We also became feminists because it’s easy to see how unfair it is. If you have any consciousness and intelligence then you can see that the situation is not fair at all.”

So you arrived at it independently, rather than from reading foreign academia?

“I think many women of my generation found feminism through their mothers or in school. If you studied in a public school you had more opportunities to be critical. Many women of my class from my generation were educated by nuns. I studied in a nun’s school. That’s what’s behind us as Guatemalan feminists, in many ways. Sometimes if they tell you something, and they impose it on you, and in your heart and in your skin and in your flesh you know that’s not true, you fight against it. You become a rebel. You don’t need to pick up a gun to be a rebel. You’re a rebel because you know what they are doing to you is not fair. I think that kind of spirit is something that comes in your blood. You don’t resign yourself to be what they tell you to be because it’ s not fair. Fairness is also a matter of feeling. It’s not only what’s written.”

What sort of things were you publishing in La Cuerda at the beginning?

“We wanted to give a voice to women who didn’t have a voice. We collected stories about what happened to women in the war, and we supported processes by which women revealed all the sexual violations which had happened during the war, because that didn’t come out in the official reports. We were also collecting new types of images of women, not just women as Barbies. We were trying to change mentalities. We had very high aspirations, but that’s what we wanted: to change mentalities and teach people to be critical. From the beginning, La Cuerda was not just a paper or the digital version, it is an organisation that has a political goal. At the same time as doing the paper we were talking, and making alliances in some cases, with women’s organisations in different parts of the country. If you want to change the world and the society in which you live, you can’t do it alone.”

What do you see as the goal of the newspaper?

“We want people to see things, discuss things and think about the problems of our society from another perspective, because that’s the fundamental feature of a feminist paper. You have all these instruments, all these tools to see society, like the concept of patriarchy. They can give you a radically different perspective. We’re trying to construct a political platform for society. I know we’re crazy, I know it’s a dream. We’ve been talking to other women, other feminists, for seven or eight years now trying to coin the terms that describe what we want. Not what there is. What there is already has names. What we want is different. You can’t imagine it. Sometimes we laugh so much and say: ‘A world without machismo? How would that be?’ For us, that means no guns. No armies. In this country, the military, and the owners of the country, we’ve been saying for years and years that we should disarm.”

Do you think there’s a big difference between what feminism means in Guatemala and what it means in Britain or America?

“There are a lot of different points of view on this! People talk about ‘white feminism’, and now in Latin America many women are talking about ‘colonial feminism’. There are different emphases. There’s a feminism that has been working with the United Nations, with human rights, which is called ‘institutional’. There is more radical feminism, there is lesbian feminism, so I think every reality and every society has its own features. It’s different talking from the first world, like England, to here because you have your own democracy and parties and the way things function. People are not dying like they are here. One of the main things that we discovered when we started this process is that Guatemalan feminism had to be conscious and marked, and to fight against racism. When we talk about women’s rights, we have to talk about indigenous women’s rights.”

What lessons have you learned from publishing La Cuerda that you would want to pass on to young feminists?

“I would tell them to confront power. When we’re educated, in schools and in our homes, we just learn that everything is as it is. They don’t tell you that it is a matter of power. Another thing that we’ve learned is that we need our history. We didn’t know about women. We didn’t know the names of the women who came before us. In the official stories that you study at school, it’s all about ‘Great Men’ – war and power and scientists, but never women. It was a beautiful adventure to go back in time to find what women had done before. For example, now there is a story of women in journalism in Guatemala and we are part of that, already. That’s very important. When you study history, newspapers are a good reflection of what is being said.”

Originally published by Shevolution.

Kualoa Ranch is a 4000-acre private nature reserve in Hawaii, most recognisable as Jurassic Park. Back in December 2015, I flew over to witness its transformation into Skull Island, a place where King Kong meets Apocalypse Now. Tom Hiddleston and director Jordan Vogt-Roberts were on hand to explain:

You decided to call two of your characters Conrad and Marlow…

Hiddleston: “The idea of Conrad and Marlow really came from Jordan. That was such a great inspiration as a spine. I think there’s something intrinsically exciting and cinematic about putting a group of disparate characters in the same place on a boat and sending them down a river. I think ‘Heart of Darkness’ has inspired so many stories like that.”

Vogt-Roberts: “This is my own personal ‘Heart of Darkness’! ‘Apocalypse Now’ is a huge reference point. The initial talking points for this movie in my mind were: ‘Man, you know what I’ve never seen? A monster movie with the aesthetic of ‘Apocalypse Now’. With Hendrix playing, with The Stones playing, with The Doors playing… thinking about the imagery and the chaos of ‘Apocalypse Now’, what was going through everyone’s mind.”

Are we going to get those things on the soundtrack?

Vogt-Roberts: “Yes! I want to see Kong punching a helicopter while Jimi Hendrix plays. But our movie… ‘Apocalypse Now’ is one of the best films of all time, and while there’s a loose inspiration there we’re ultimately making a very big and accessible movie. ‘Apocalypse Now’ is almost Malick-esque in the way that it has to wash over you, and I don’t quite think that’s opening on 3,000 screens these days. There are aesthetic inspirations, and inspirations in terms of the madness that this place takes on and the journey that going up the river has for these people, but, you know, it’s an easy talking point on the movie when you look at a lot of these things. We’re going for something bigger than that, more adventurous than that.”

What sort of hero is Hiddleston’s Conrad?

Vogt-Roberts: “There’s a bit of Steve McQueen in there. Tom’s so great, and charming, and textured. We initially were talking about making him American. One of the big things that came out was instantly separating him from Packard and the rest of his men. In the context of a movie that takes place in the shadow of Vietnam – those are generally very uniquely American stories – a lot of the conversations about Tom it became clear that it was a way to make the movie feel bigger, more worldly and to give him a different perspective on what was going on at that time. There actually were a lot of British soldiers in Vietnam, which is something which is downplayed pretty significantly. It’s viewed as a uniquely American war, which it wasn’t quite. There were a lot of avenues that led us there, a lot of it was just really trying to create clear and concise sides.”

Hiddleston: “Indiana Jones of course came up, as an icon and a silhouette, in a way. He’s somebody who has an intellectual passion and becomes an adventurer. We always wanted Conrad to be that. We knew we couldn’t make him like Martin Sheen in ‘Apocalypse Now’ because that’s a very heavy character – another iconic performance – but this needed more wit. It’s an adventure film. It will be spectacular – I know that already having been on this for nine weeks. I’ve seen it. It needs to be fun. Having made a couple of films on this scale, the ones that are the most successful have a balance of weight and drama and also of wit.”

Inauguration Day in The Big Easy… Dancing to reclaim the streets in Trump’s America… Rallying cries in front of City Hall… Six-foot vagina in the nightclub… Hope in the dark…