Hotel Artemis: Brothers in Arms

Hotel Artemis is a dystopian crime thriller written and directed by Drew Pearce (Iron Man 3), who makes his feature debut behind the camera with a top-notch cast that includes Jodie Foster, Jeff Goldblum, Zachary Quinto, Sofia Boutella, Jenny Slate, Dave Bautista, Charlie Day and Sterling K. Brown.

The movie is set in Los Angeles in the year 2028, with water shortages, environmental collapse and rampant crime threatening to bring the City of Angels to its knees.

In a rundown hotel in downtown Los Angeles, there exists a hospital where criminals can safely get treated for their injuries with no questions asked and no shooting allowed.

One must be a member to enter Hotel Artemis, which is bankrolled by a crime lord known as the Wolf King (Goldblum) and manned only by the Nurse (Foster) and her assistant/security guard Everest (Bautista).

As the movie starts, brothers and low-level bank robbers played by Sterling K. Brown and Brian Tyree Henry get caught in a botched heist. Henry’s character is wounded and the two of them make their way to Hotel Artemis.

There, they are assigned to the Waikiki and Honolulu rooms (no one uses their real names) for treatment. But as others come to Hotel Artemis, it soon becomes clear that the job the brothers were involved in will have repercussions that could reach all the way to the Wolf King.

In the following clip, we asked Brown and Henry how Drew Pearce wanted to develop the dynamic between the two brothers:

 

“They are criminals, they sort of have this symbiotic relationship in which one can’t function without the other,” says Brown in our interview. “There’s an unhealthy co-dependency and it goes both ways.”

Henry adds that Drew Pearce wanted to emphasize the love between the siblings. “Most of our scenes were closed set, so we could really just dive in and have no boundaries of where we were gonna go,” he explains. “And it was very precious…to maintain that kind of care about what our friendship and our brotherhood was.”

Hotel Artemis is out in theaters this Friday (June 8).