Life imitating art: how stars are born in Crollywood

Lights, camera, action: performance artist Richard DeDomenici will be premiering his latest Redux film this month, a subversive and audacious attempt to deconstruct Hollywood movies by recreating them on a minimal budget with local participants.

For his latest film, he shot scenes from Heads of State, starring Idris Elba, Priyanka Chopra and John Cena, in the same back streets of Croydon where the original 2025 movie was filmed.

Only DeDomenici’s Heads of State: Redux features a train announcer, ballet dancer and artist, among others, some of whom have never acted before.

His short films are both an homage to the originals and an irreverent attempt to democratise cinema, stripping away the Hollywood veneer of glitz and questioning the way in which blockbuster movies engage with the physical locations and communities they are filmed in.

DeDomenici has shot more than 100 Reduxes around the world since 2013, from Sydney and Bangkok to Hong Kong and, equally glamorously, Norwich and Croydon.

“I just want to show people that rather than being passive consumers of culture, we can be active creators,” says DeDomenici.

“Most of us have got the technology now in our pockets to make something look like it costs millions of dollars for the equivalent of a dollar.

“I hope to encourage people to make their own culture.That's what the Redux project is all about.”

His latest project is one of his most ambitious, featuring a police car crash, an explosion and a shoot-out.

How he managed to pull off this coup will be revealed at the premiere.

Crucially, he managed to shoot scenes in the same streets as the Hollywood film, matching the action frame for frame - even though Croydon doubled for Warsaw in the original movie.

DeDomenici posits that his subversive take on Hollywood engages with neighbourhoods in a more authentic way than the originals.

Indeed, he is now considering whether to shoot movies in the locations where they are supposed to be set.

“That could be an interesting new spin on the project,” he says, “to recreate films in the locations where they were supposed to be, to try and improve on the originals.”

The Redux Project was born by chance. The artist was changing trains in Gare de l’Est station in Paris in 2009 when he realised it was used as the backdrop to a scene from the film Amelie.

“I didn’t have a smartphone at that point,” he says, “and it wasn’t possible for me to look up the clip, so I recreated it from memory, with me trying to narrate in French. 

“It was really bad but I thought with some preparation and a bit more research, there was something quite intriguing about the idea.”

Two years later and with better technology, he was in Berlin and decided to shoot scenes from The Bourne Supremacy.

With new colour grading software, he was “amazed by how I could get my footage shot on an iPhone to look like this huge movie”.

He calls those attempts his Preduxes. His first Redux, commissioned by Forest Fringe arts organisation in 2013 and premiered in Thailand, was his take on Bangkok Traffic Love Story, in which he played the female romantic lead.

DeDomenici prefers to direct these days and shoots on a Sony camcorder and iPhone.

He often casts against type to expose inequalities, although as Heads of State already featured a diverse ensemble, he found local participants bearing a resemblance to their counterparts.

The Redux Project, DeDomenici says, is a “series of inexpensive cinematic approximations that both celebrate and critique the cultural heritage of the places

it visits.

“They are filmed in the original locations and star local, often non-professional participants. I shoot on a furious schedule with little more than a cheap camera and my wits.”

The project is supported by the Croydonites festival of new theatre and performance, which backed his previous Reduxes of All Of Us Strangers and American Assassin – the latter set in Istanbul but shot in St George’s Walk, Croydon.

Festival director Anna Arthur says: “It’s a lot of fun. We get to involve local participants and it is amazing what Richard can do with such a low-tech, low-budget approach.”

Associate director Katie Hurley adds: “It’s a very cool concept, recreating moments from great films in their original location.

“Croydon is becoming a really popular destination for filming. In the film world, they call it a mini Manhattan.”

The London suburb has attracted the likes of makers of Black Mirror, Batman, The Da Vinci Code and even Taylor Swift, leading to it earning the moniker Crollywood.

Architecture enthusiast DeDomenici says: “Croydon is rich in cinematic history as well as being an epicentre of brutalism.”

He will be leading a walking tour of famous Croydon film locations from 2pm on Saturday November 14, before the premiere of Heads of State: Redux in the David Lean Cinema at 3.30pm.

DeDomenici’s previous Reduxes have included Queer as Yolk – a female take on Channel 4’s cult series Queer as Folk – The Matrix, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, One Day and Trainspotting.

In the ultimate subversive act, he took over the airwaves in 2015 to stage 10 Reduxes of classic moments from BBC history, in its former White City home.

He was one of four performance artists invited to take part in Live From Television Centre on BBC4. 

“We were trying to deconstruct television in a television centre that was itself being deconstructed,” he says.

DeDomenici’s other urban-absurdist interventions have included creating a crocheted cryptocurrency called Knitcoin, an international office chair-based sport called the Swivelympics, and gatecrashing the actual Olympics with a fake torch.

Tickets for the Crollywood walking tour and premiere of Heads of State: Redux can be booked on the website here.