GENERAL INFO
  

  Director: Jez Butterworth
Producers: Eric Abraham, George Faber, Steve Butterworth, Nick Marston
Screenwriters: Jez Butterworth, Tom Butterworth
Cast: Ian Hart, Ewen Bremmer, Aidan Gillen, Harold Pinter, Martin Gwynn Jones, Hans Matheson, Andy Serkis
Cinematographer: Bruno De Keyzer
Editor: Richard Milward
Music: Murray Gold
Rating: MPAA NONE\BBFC 15 (British Board of Film Classification)
Run Time: 91 minutes
  
   

Jez Butterworth directed this film adaptation of his own play, which premiered at the Royal Court Theatre, London, in July 1995. Quickly selling out all performances in London and the US, Mojo collected a laundry list of awards including: the 1995 George Devine Award for Most Promising Playwright, the 1995 Writers' Guild New Writer of the Year Award, the Evening Standard Award for Most Promising Playwright and the 1995 Olivier Award for Britain's Best Comedy. It has since been translated into 9 languages.

Aidan as Baby The place is Soho. Summer. 1958. British youth, seduced by the speed and optimism of a glittering American future have swapped their ration looks for rock 'n' roll records. The place to be is Ezra's Atlantic Club, where the up-and-coming young pop star Silver Johnny (Hans Matheson) performs nightly to a growing crowd of ecstatic teenagers. Life is good, and for the boys who work for Ezra, the days and nights blend into one long string of sex, drink and pills.

Silver Johnny fast becomes a hot commodity and Ezra's club turns into the battleground for clubland success, seemingly guaranteed with Silver Johnny as the star performer. But Johnny catches the eye of big-shot rival club owner, Sam Ross (a salaciously grinning Harold Pinter). He invites Johnny and his manager Ezra (Ricky Tomlinson) for a meeting to discuss Johnny's jump to a bigger plateau. Before anyone can dream what to do with all the money they'll make, Ezra turns up dead, Silver Johnny disappears, and Ezra's associate Mickey (Ian Hart) announces that Ross intends to take over the Atlantic Club, setting the stage for major power struggles.


Set within a day, the action spins at a furious pace. With the hurling of venomous barbs, the film becomes a black comedy, murder mystery of sorts. Unqualified to successfully operate his late father's Soho bar, the volatile Baby (Aidan Gillen) relentlessly bullies Skinny (Ewan Bremner), a sniveling wannabe.

Shown at the 1997 Venice Film Festival, MOJO is a coming-of-age story, about a bunch of kids who end up tasting violence while American-styled rock 'n' roll rules the territory. Their involvement in the violent death of their boss causes the men to teeter precariously through the next twenty four hours in an incoherent battle for some form of survival. Loyalties are betrayed as deals get made - all with the most fatal consequences.


*Note: Aidan played the character of Skinny in the Royal Court Theatre production of MOJO.
 
THE WRITER/DIRECTOR
  
 

Jez Butterworth

Born 4 March, 1969 in London, Jez Butterworth was brought up, with his brother Tom, in St. Albans and educated at Cambridge University. Together with his brother he wrote THE CENSUS MAN as part of Carlton Television New Writer Course. This led to their being commissioned in 1993 to make THE NIGHT OF THE GOLDEN BRAIN, a short film about a pub quiz team, (GOING UNDERGROUND series).

MOJOJez then wrote his first stage play MOJO, which opened at the Royal Court Theater in 1995 and was an incredible critical and public success, with the play winning the Olivier and Evening Standard Most Promising Playwright Awards. He then teamed up again with Tom to co-write CHRISTMAS (1996), a modern morality tale about a teenager, set in London, which was broadcast on Channel 4 and directed by Mark Munden. With MOJO, Jez Butterworth makes his debut as a feature film director.

"During the long process of writing the screenplay I made an exhilarating discovery: Mickey's guilt and Baby's pain are essentially private, silent, there for us to watch. This is what the film is about - so the story might be better told on film". -- J. Butterworth
 

  • "A finely-crafted film by Jez Butterworth based on his prize-winning play set in a sordid London club in 1958 at the height of rock-and-roll madness, with mesmerizing language and performances."
                                                                    -- Filmmaker Magazine
  • "The language, blunt and coarse and often hilarious, pours out of the characters with the force of the blaring jukebox rock that forms a leitmotif for the dark, violent action."    -- Chicago Tribune


  • "It is the best group casting I've ever seen in a British film. The action goes like a bat into hell: something odd, perverse or surreally unexpected appearing every few minutes, like the white lilies pinned to the uglies' lapels or the toffee apples like poisoned favours that Baby hands round to his enemies. It's intense in an indirect way: you sense rather than locate the source of evil. And although claustrophobic, it has the power of a boiler room to pump its heat through the habitation. "Mojo", I'm told, alludes to the demon within. Here the devil's let out, and performs in style."   -- Alexander Walker, London Evening Standard
    • REVIEWS





  • Review #1 (Financial Times)


  • Review #2 (London Evening Standard)


  • Reviews #3-4 (Sam Ashman/Rich Cline)


  • Review #5 (New York Times)


    "Where Mojo really succeeds is in the development of the characters and the way unfolding events quickly reveal the darker side of their lives. All the characters have in some way been damaged by the world."
                                         -- Sam Ashman


    •  "Brilliant might cover it." -- Daily Mail

     "The Royal Court's most dazzling main-stage debut in years." -- Michael Billington, Guardian

      "Butterworth enjoys writing about brutal, amoral politicking and counter-politicking, and with Mojo he has hit the jackpot; he leaves the audience, like his characters, scrambling to keep up with barely suggested twists, but grimly enjoying the struggle."


      "Andy Serkis and Matt Bardock make a prime double-act as Potts and Sweets, trying at first to stay ahead of the game and then simply to stay in one piece. David Westhead's Mickey is a fine would-be godfather, whose quiet authority evaporates under the fear that his secret will be revealed, and Aidan Gillen transforms himself from the most compelling young Irish actor of the decade into the whining East London toe-rag Skinny who, instructed to go out and secure some fire-power, returns waving a single dinky Derringer pistol."
    (MOJO Royal Court Theatre Production [1995])
                                           -- Ian Shuttleworth, Financial Times


     "The Atlantic Club is the place to be in 1958 Soho, and pop-idol Silver Johnny (Hans Matheson) is its rising star. He is carefully guarded by the club's owner (RIFF RAFF's Ricky Tomlinson) and his gang of henchmen and hangers-on led by Mickey (Ian Hart) but underworld kingpin Sam Ross (Harold Pinter, in an unforgettable performance) wants a piece of the action. Gorgeously shot by Bruno de Keyzer, Jez Butterworth's stunningly assured adaptation of his own award-winning play is a vivid, emotionally charged piece of filmmaking: richly textured, evocative of its period but without an ounce of nostalgia, and masterful in its slow metamorphosis from cheerful exuberance to the ripest evil."
                                         -- New British Cinema Programme
                                                 (The Walter Reade Theatre, NY)