It’s 40 minutes until Mark Molloy’s first feature film lands on Netflix, and he’s sitting at home in Los Angeles and watching the clock. If this were a movie scene, the minute hand would be in extreme close-up, and the sound of its ticking over would be deafening.
There’s a lot riding on Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F — the first entry in the franchise for 30 years, and the beginning of a movie career that Molloy has been trying to get going for almost as long.
“I’ve always known I wanted to make a film,” he says. “It’s [just that] wanting to make a film and actually making a film are two very different things, unfortunately.”
Molloy started out as a graphic designer before becoming an advertisement director at Exit Films in Melbourne, working alongside other young talent like director Garth Davis (Lion) and Dune cinematographer Greig Fraser, who started there as a cleaner and shot Molloy’s first-ever music video.
He became one of the most successful directors of commercials in Australia, but decamped to Los Angeles a decade ago with the idea of following his friends into movies.
In 2020, he was halfway through his first film, a coming-of-age story filmed in Ukraine, when it was shut down because of the pandemic; it remains uncompleted.
“It was heartbreaking,” he says.
But the end of his abbreviated career as a feature filmmaker was also the beginning: in a “surreal and amazing” twist, he received a phone call on location from Jerry Bruckheimer, the iconic producer of Top Gun, Bad Boys, Pirates of the Caribbean — and Beverly Hills Cop.
Hollywood Calling
Beverly Hills Cop topped the box office in 1984 and gave Eddie Murphy his most iconic role as Axel Foley, a streetwise Detroit cop who travels to California to investigate the murder of his best friend.
The film cemented Murphy’s superstardom the year after his stand-up special Delirious and the hit comedy Trading Places, and kicked off a remarkable run of hits at the American box office.
Two sequels were released in 1987 and 1994 respectively. The new film comes four decades after the original and three decades since the last instalment; Murphy is now 63.
So how did Bruckheimer land upon an unknown Aussie for the formidable task of reviving one of the most beloved characters in Hollywood history? Well, he watched a series of “weird short films” that Molloy had made for Apple.
In The Underdogs, a team of put-upon office workers prep for an all-important meeting with the aid of a dizzying number of Apple products and tools. The spot demonstrated Molloy’s sense of humour and his ability to work with an ensemble, and it won him a series of awards, including two Gold Cannes Lions, the biggest awards in the advertising industry.
Bruckheimer — who gave Bad Boys director Michael Bay his first feature credit — sent Molloy several scripts, but it was the one for a new Beverly Hills Cop that piqued the director’s interest.
The story sends Axel Foley back to Beverly Hills to protect his estranged daughter Jane (Taylour Paige), a lawyer defending an accused cop killer who resents her father for being mostly absent. Molloy loved the dynamic and how vulnerable it made his hero.
“Axel has dealt with all these bad dudes over the years, but his daughter’s the one person that none of his shit works against. All of his wit and his humour and his charm is useless against his daughter.”
Bruckheimer was a fan, but Molloy still had to convince Axel Foley himself that he was the right man for the job.
“I had to go to Eddie’s house,” he says. “Me, Eddie Murphy and Jerry Bruckheimer are sitting on a couch at Eddie’s place. I’m a kid from Ballarat. It was just like, what the hell am I doing on Eddie Murphy’s couch?!”
His told the star he wanted to make an 80s-style action comedy worthy of those first two Beverly Hills Cop films, which were funny but still had suspense and real emotion; they had stakes.
Molloy wanted to ground it, to make it gritty and honest, without sacrificing laughs.
“I think it’s a very hard balance to strike,” he says. “And I don’t think many films actually do it right.”
Beverly Hills Director
Molloy’s balancing act was made easier by his leading man once they were on set. Murphy is famous for his improvisation, but he also had “a really innate sense of his character”.
“[He had] great instincts on when to play it comedically and when we should let the drama play out,” Molloy says, admitting that while he was confident behind the camera, working with actors at that level was “a big jump”.
In addition to Murphy, the cast includes Kevin Bacon and Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Gordon-Levitt plays a LAPD cop — a former flame of Axel’s daughter who is forced to team up with Axel to protect the woman he loves, and the straight man to Murphy’s wildcard.
“You don’t want two Eddie Murphys sitting in a car next to each other,” says Molloy. “It just doesn’t work.”
Their double act recalls buddy-cop classics like Lethal Weapon, and the new film is very much a love letter to the films that Molloy grew up watching in the 1980s, right down to the visual approach (they even made a special 80s edit of the trailer).
He wanted to shoot all the action in camera, instead of cobbling it together on a computer later. In one sequence, Axel pursues robbers through the streets on a commandeered snowplough, and Molloy did it for real.
“People don’t do that anymore. People don’t drive around LA with a low loader, especially if you’ve got Eddie Murphy on the back.”
The director also made liberal use of of long lenses and zoom shots..
“The way Tony Scott captured LA in Beverly Hills Cop II is so cool. You know, that dusky light and all the smog. I wanted LA to be a big presence.”
The director’s giddiness about his adopted home shines through in the film; now he just has to wait for the town’s reactions.
“The industry’s response to the film comes out in 40 minutes. 40 minutes. So I am that nervous it’s not funny.”
Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F is screening now on Netflix.