The cold was brutal and so were the gangsters. It was the first – and worse, only – day of shooting, and when cinematographer Julio Macat threaded some film into his camera, it was so cold that the film snapped. The gangsters flitted around menacingly, fedoras and machine guns at the ready.
Macat was hoping to make a movie that was frightening and strange. “The goal,” he says, “was to scare a kid.” And so, even though it was 1990, he chose to shoot the noir like it was the 40s, with black and white film, fog filters on the camera lenses, and an intense, old-fashioned lighting setup to cast deep shadows on the set.
Macat needed to do all of this to make the perfect family Christmas film.
“It’s amazing to me how a lot of people don’t know that it’s not a real movie,” says Macat, almost 40 years later. He is talking – of course – about Angels with Filthy Souls, the film that sits inside the festive classic Home Alone. Our hero Kevin McCallister (Macaulay Culkin) watches the gangster flick wide-eyed when he’s left – you guessed it – home alone, and the fake film’s action sequences inspire Kevin’s later capers.
But Angels with Filthy Souls ended up looking so realistic that audiences – including, for his “entire childhood”, the actor Seth Rogen – thought it was a real golden oldie.
How do you make a film-inside-a-film? They are a fairly frequent but tragically understudied phenomenon – the Wikipedia entry, “List of films featuring fictional films” collates about 120 of them, but there are actually hundreds more. “They’re all great in their own way,” says Lynn Fisher, the 40-year-old creator of the speciality website “Nestflix”, which catalogues more than 1,000 stories nested in other stories. “I especially appreciate ones that obviously took a lot of effort to create. It’s the small details that really make it.”
Fisher created Nestflix during a bout of unemployment in 2021 – she crafted the site to look like a streaming service. Ever since she learned that Angels with Filthy Souls wasn’t a real movie, the Arizona-based web designer has been fascinated by what she calls “nested films”. Her other favourites are teen drama The Pink Opaque from the psychological horror I Saw the TV Glow and the spy biopic Austinpussy from Austin Powers in Goldmember.
Strangely, Home Alone isn’t the only festive film to host a fake film – it’s a fairly common occurrence. There’s Turbo Man: The Motion Picture in Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Jingle All the Way and The Night the Reindeer Died in Scrooged, not to mention the trailer for action film Deception in The Holiday.
“I think they ground things,” says Macat, “it makes a movie more believable.” It makes sense that festive films need to be grounded with a bit of (fake) reality – it’s a speedy way to show the audience that fantastical Christmas magic is actually occurring in the real world. The Holiday’s production designer Jon Hutman has another theory. “Usually when there’s a film within a film the characters come to recognise that they are within the movie of their own lives,” he says, “and they have to rise, on some level, to being the hero of their own stories.”
Audiences see less than 30 seconds of Deception in The Holiday, but nonetheless numerous online commenters wish the film was real. The action movie follows “your average 20-year-old” Rebecca Green (Lindsay Lohan), a waitress who is left something mysterious in her estranged father’s will. There are gunshots, explosions and steamy kisses.
“You try to make it good without making it distracting,” Hutman says of making a film-within-a-film. As the set designer on The Holiday, Hutman was focused on bringing to life the now famous houses in the movie – an adorable English cottage and sprawling LA mansion. In comparison, he had to make the cafe in Deception understated and undistracting, while action sequences on an industrial-looking staircase and behind a chain-link fence set the tone with familiar tropey visuals. “You want it to be beautiful and clear and hopefully a little bit elegant and simple,” Hutman says.
While Hutman admits that movies-within-movies can often be an “afterthought” for production, he says he personally treats these scenes the same as any others. Macat, too, certainly handled Angels with Filthy Souls like it was a real blockbuster – even though he had to shoot it in just one day, the final prep day before principal filming on Home Alone began.
“You’re scared shitless, because it’s the first thing that the studio will see,” Macat says. It was his first movie as director of photography, and he battled impostor syndrome on set, particularly because he hadn’t used black and white film since film school. Nonetheless, when shooting started: “I could tell that we were doing something different and interesting.”
“It was obviously inspired by Angels with Dirty Faces, and that sort of gangster type movie from 1938,” Macat explains. Because the old school film that Macat was shooting on wasn’t as light-sensitive as modern stuff, he required five times the amount of lighting – he also put some black netting over the lens to make the shots seem more vintage. Then there were smoke machines and a vintage Tommy gun used to pump the gangster “Snakes” full of lead. “It was all with the intent to shoot something that a kid hadn’t seen before that would scare the pants off him when he’s watching it by himself.”
In 2006, cinematographer Baz Irvine was about to work with auteur Nicolas Roeg on the supernatural horror Puffball – but then he broke his arm in a snowboarding accident. “I had this idea that I was going to be this leading light in alternative indie cinema in the UK and Ireland,” Irvine says – but, with a plaster cast up to his shoulders, he had to pull out of Puffball and scrabble for less physically demanding work. That’s how he ended up on Mr Bean’s Holiday.
In Mr Bean’s Holiday, the titular Mr Bean wins a trip to Cannes. There, he watches – and ultimately interferes with – the premiere of arthouse film Playback Time, described as, “a film for all of us who hunger for truth, for all of us who cry out in pain”. Willem Dafoe plays actor-director Carson Clay in Mr Bean’s Holiday; Carson Clay plays a heartbroken detective in Playback Time. “I think Willem was completely baffled as to what was going on the whole time he was on the film,” Irvine laughs. “His scenes were so out of sync with each other and made no sense.”
Irvine says Playback Time was, “not just a film within a film, but a homage to so many genres and a love letter to French cinema.”. So, in a way, the cinematographer did get to work on an indie darling. We see Dafoe ruminate in a long opening shot as he rises up an escalator – later, he runs through various industrial-looking spaces and stares into the distance as a tear rolls down his cheek. Footage was shot around London’s ExCel centre and Irvine estimates that filming lasted three days. He swapped from regular spherical lenses to anamorphic lenses with “that classic widescreen Hollywood look” to give Playback Time a different vibe from the rest of the film.
“We just went to town on making something silly and fun and photographic,” Irvine says, “We were allowed to be indulgent.” The crew even had to crash the real Cannes festival to get shots for Playback Time’s premiere, walking the red carpet before the cast of a (real) Portuguese movie. “When you’re making a film, it’s quite gruelling. No matter how creative or brilliant it is, there is a monotony to the everyday,” Irvine says. “So it’s brilliant to be able to just suddenly put new lenses on, have a totally different aesthetic, and not worry so much.”
Fake films certainly aren’t going anywhere – in May, Apple TV renewed The Studio, a satirical show about a Hollywood honcho who makes movies such as Alphabet City (a 1970s crime drama) and Duhpocalypse! (a zombie/diarrhoea epic). The Holiday’s fake action film featured very real celebrities – James Franco starred alongside Lohan, as did the instantly recognisable trailer narrator Hal Douglas – and so too does The Studio. The show’s casting director Melissa Kostenbauder managed to secure Martin Scorsese for its pilot. “We felt so lucky he wanted to do it,” she told Vulture, “Everyone was excited he was even entertaining it to begin with.”
But, you might wonder, who exactly created and stars in The Studio? None other than Seth Rogen. Perhaps the revelation about Angels with Filthy Souls inspired the star to make his own nested films.
Firm fan Fisher believes films-in-films should achieve one of three things. The first is that the phoney film should feel real, even if it’s a joke – audiences should say: “I can’t believe that movie is fake.” The second is that the crew should’ve “put way more time into that than they needed to”, that the attention to detail should be remarkable in and of itself. And, “The third reaction you want,” Fisher says, “is for people to say, I wish that was real so I could watch it.”
