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"  Editing the annual Esquire at the Movies\u00A0issue is, I fancy in my wilder, even-more-megalomaniacal-than-usual moments, not unlike playing a\u00A0video game: Fantasy Film Producer.  First you need a director, the\u00A0best you can get. You\u2019ll want a\u00A0critical darling, of course, but a crowd-pleaser, too; an\u00A0auteur, but not an art-house priss. Someone\u00A0with\u00A0a track record of making films spectacular and\u00A0sophisticated, thrilling and fast-paced but also nuanced, intelligent, moving \u2013 even profound.  Let\u2019s start at the very top, just to rule him out:\u00A0is Marty available? Marty, it turns out, is between pictures. But Stephen Smith, Newsnight culture correspondent and Esquire contributing editor, recently caught up with the world\u2019s greatest living film-maker in New York for an extensive discussion on past glories, present obsessions and future plans. They talked movies from Taxi Driver to The Wolf of Wall Street and another film Scorsese\u2019s hoping to get off the ground: The Irishman, starring Robert de Niro.  So Marty\u2019s in. This is a good start. The best start possible. You can get anyone you want with Marty.     And now what we want is a star. An A-lister, clearly, with box-office clout, but none of your weedy, pretty boy hunks. We want someone with kudos, with depth, with substance. An Oscar winner, if we can get one. But an Oscar winner who can convincingly kick arse. Who can bring it, when we need it brung.  Seems too good to be true, but Christian Bale\u2019s got a film on the way \u2013\u00A0Exodus: Gods and Kings, the\u00A0new Old Testament epic from Ridley Scott. Bale plays Moses. He wouldn\u2019t hop aboard, would he?  Calls are made and, on one memorable occasion, taken. Bale\u2019s up for it. Batman/Bateman/Bible Man is in. Our creative director, Nick Millington, flies to California to orchestrate Peggy Sirota\u2019s shoot, at which the famously intense star of Americans Psycho and Hustle, plus The Fighter and The Dark Knight trilogy, reveals a lighter, looser, loopier side. Another meeting is arranged: early in the morning at a down-at-heel Mexican place in East LA. Esquire\u2019s deputy editor, Johnny Davis, finds Bale on fighting form: fatherhood, religion, motorbikes and Rob Brydon\u2019s impression of Tom Hardy doing Bane; no topic is off limits. The man, reports Johnny, is a mensch. You can see why he keeps getting the big roles.  So we have our star. Now our drama needs some conflict. A black hat to Bale\u2019s white. Someone with heft, gravitas, a bit of\u00A0menace if the moment requires it. Wait, what\u2019s that? Marty has a suggestion. Ray Winstone? They worked together on The Departed? Of course they did! Is Raymondo available? Raymondo is! Ben Mitchell is dispatched to meet him and, as ever, finds the world\u2019s favourite East Londoner in fine fettle. This is coming together nicely.      How about an unexpected cameo, to keep our film issue on its toes? Someone we love and respect but perhaps haven\u2019t heard from in a while. Someone who can come in and shake shit up, steal his scenes, add the element of danger. Word has it Michael Keaton\u2019s about to have a moment, in Birdman. That\u2019s Michael Keaton as in\u00A0Mr Mom, Beetlejuice, Batman... (Yep, another one.)  But the live-wire Keaton is notoriously mercurial. How to pin him down? Happily, American Esquire\u2019s Tom Chiarella spent some time at Keaton\u2019s ranch in Montana earlier this year. The result of that meeting is a delightfully freewheeling, iconoclastic portrait of\u00A0a Hollywood survivor. Keaton, amazingly, is in.  So that\u2019s Scorsese to direct Bale, Winstone\u00A0and Keaton. A dream team. What else? Well, no\u00A0disrespect to those four but now we need some younger blood. Eddie Redmayne is already well established but in this month\u2019s The Theory of Everything, he breaks into the big league. I don\u2019t want to jinx anything, but far better informed people than me are talking Oscar. Speaking of which, the most exciting new face in cinema for some time belongs\u00A0to Jack O\u2019Connell, he of Starred Up, \u201971 and, now, Angelina Jolie\u2019s Unbroken, also tipped for prizes.  Eddie and Jack? In and, once again, in.  And what kind of movie are we making here? Well, it\u2019s not a romcom, is it? Nor a cloying bromance, thanks very much. Superhero blockbuster? Bale and\u00A0Keaton have been there, done that. Plus: not Marty\u2019s style. Screw it. You know what I want to see?\u00A0A proper, old-fashioned, grown-up action thriller,\u00A0the kind of thing no one made anymore until Liam Neeson revived the genre with Taken. (Fans of that film should pay attention to page 102.)  Now we need a script. Great writers are not in short supply at Esquire: this issue, in addition to those mentioned above, we\u2019ve been able to call on Kevin Maher, novelist and columnist; Bennett Miller, director of Capote, Moneyball and the remarkable Foxcatcher; and the world\u2019s greatest writer on the movies, David Thomson. Script should be a doddle.  But there\u2019s something else missing. Jean-Luc Godard once said all you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun. Guns we have (thanks, props). Girls? Happily, there\u2019s another film on the horizon that plays right into our pages. A film that isn\u2019t likely to trouble the Academy, nor the Esquire reader as he scans the listings, looking for something to see. But if you\u2019re playing Fantasy Film Producer/movie-issue editor,\u00A0as I am, the imminent release of Fifty Shades of Grey does provide an excuse to draft in lots of nearly-naked actresses \u2013 and some actors \u2013 to make things go with a swing.     Not that our use of these images is at all gratuitous, you understand, supported as they are\u00A0by essays by Thomson, on the role of the naked body in cinema, and Maher, who counts down the ten most important sex movies in cinema history.  \u201CKiss Kiss Bang Bang\u201D is the headline on that final\u00A0feature. You\u2019ll know the phrase, perhaps, from the cultish, slightly-too-pleased-with-itself Robert Downey Jr/Val Kilmer movie from 2005. Before that, among other things, it was the title of a book by the famous New Yorker film critic, Pauline Kael. And before that it was a phrase used, slightly dismissively, to describe the plots of James Bond films.  Bond, you\u2019ll be relieved to learn, also features in this issue, on page 120. Because you didn\u2019t seriously expect us to get through a whole men\u2019s magazine film\u00A0issue without mentioning 007, did you?  Buy the January issue in shops today or take out a subscription to the print edition. You can also download our new enhanced digital edition designed especially for iPad. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.co.uk/culture/news/a7466/january-issue-editors-letter/>