Post by avalon on Aug 31, 2007 19:55:56 GMT 9.5
hello ..."pets" after a while I'M BACK...boooo xoxoxox.hope you're doing great!
hope to get soon some new MIRANDA PICS FROM MONTREAL ,VENICE OR WHEREVER she could be....bloody hell!!! hope to find more miranda at "wireimage"nth new at this point.
peace & love
Nessa
STAYING TRUE TO HIS STRANGE ART
Nicolas Roeg, the filmmaker behind Don't Look Now and The Man Who Fell to Earth, is in Montreal with his new film Puffball, which adds to the director's reputation as a genre-busting trailblazer
MATTHEW HAYS
Special to The Globe and Mail
August 31, 2007
MONTREAL -- Nicolas Roeg gives me a warning as he sits down to discuss his latest film. "I mumble a great deal when I talk," he confesses. "I was talking to Liz Taylor once on a set, and she said, 'Stop mumbling, I can't hear a damn thing you're saying!' "
The British filmmaker is in Montreal for the North American premiere of Puffball, his 15th theatrical feature, at the World Film Festival.
The movie has already gained distinction as one of the strangest entries at this year's event, full of quirky characters, unusual plot twists and a style and aura that defy genre classification. It is, after all, a Nicolas Roeg movie.
Puffball has Kelly Reilly playing an architect who bought a dilapidated house in a remote part of Ireland in hope of rebuilding it. After finding herself unexpectedly pregnant, Reilly also finds that her oddball neighbours are becoming increasingly hostile. Curses are placed on Reilly by women who appear to have witch-like powers; secrets are revealed and ghosts unleashed. Miranda Richardson and Donald Sutherland round out the cast. Roeg concedes the unusually paced film is altogether atypical, but he insists that's the way he's always liked to work.
"I was sent the script and immediately liked it," he recalls. "It's based on a novel by Fay Weldon, and I think she's an entirely underrated writer. Her work is superb. This tale is full of hidden truths, things revealed when people's lives cross by chance."
Now in his late 70s, Roeg began work as a cinematographer on films like Jazz Boat (1960) and Roger Corman's The Masque of the Red Death (1964).
In 1970, he would make the leap into directing, co-helming Performance with Donald Cammell. That film became a countercultural landmark, in which a hardened gangster clashed with a washed-up rock musician (the latter famously played by Mick Jagger). Performance made an auspicious debut for Roeg, and he followed it up with Walkabout (1971), about two children forced to cope after being stranded in the Australian outback, Don't Look Now (1973), a psychic thriller in which Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie roam the streets of Venice while haunted by the recent death of their daughter, and The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), wherein David Bowie plays an alien who lands here in an effort to save his own planet.
Each one of these features was regarded as a standout, and afforded Roeg a reputation as a genre-busting trailblazer. Walking into a Roeg film, audiences could be assured of one thing: They would get something entirely unexpected.
Roeg is notorious for being unlike Hitchcock; the "Master of Suspense" was renowned for storyboarding every shot down to the most minute detail before filming. But Roeg has always insisted on an organic shooting style. "What makes God laugh is people who make plans," he once remarked. Thus his career is peppered with anecdotes of improvised dialogue, brilliant mistakes and last-minute script rewrites.
Many credit Roeg with helping to reinvent modern cinema, taking the medium from straightforward narrative storytelling to a cryptic and atmospheric style that's more associated with the European masters. Among the many filmmakers who have cited Roeg as a profound influence is Steven Soderbergh, who made direct reference to the love-making scene between Sutherland and Christie in Don't Look Now in his 1998 movie Out of Sight.
Roeg confirms that getting his distinctive vision to the big screen hasn't always been easy, and that there have, from time to time, been conflicts with the money people.
"Producers will say, 'Nic, they won't get that. They just won't get it.' I always say, 'Who's they? What you mean is, you don't get it.' "
Roeg also concedes that his career has had its share of bumps. The eighties and nineties were marked by an uneven array of features, including Insignificance (1985) and Track 29 (1988) as well as TV work. "The good thing is, films live on, even after what might be an initial negative response. And you never know what the response is going to be. Even the ones people said were really good later, the critics hated when they first came out. Of Performance, [New York critic] John Simon wrote, "even the cinema stank." And I can quote the Time Out London review for Bad Timing by heart: The critic wrote simply, 'There is weird and there is Bad Timing.' That was the entire review! That one was easy to memorize."
Roeg credits at least part of his filmmaking chutzpah to directors he'd worked with as a cinematographer. In 1966, he shot Fahrenheit 451, the sci-fi dystopia directed by François Truffaut. "We became very close friends. Actually, his English wasn't very good. He had the script pored over, with each sentence flattened grammatically. It was a film depicting a dreadful future, so he made sure the language was stilted. I remember saying to him, 'This is really quite stiff.' He replied, 'Good.' "
And Roger Corman, the notoriously thrifty director and producer? "One of a kind. He was terrific. At the end of Masque of Red Death, he turned to me and said, 'Let's buy these sets and make another movie right away!' "
Despite all the shifts in international filmmaking - and the increase in corporate ownership of the means of distribution - Roeg is not despondent about the current state of affairs. While securing funding for the Canada-Ireland co-production Puffball was tricky, he says it "was really intriguing to do. It's not a love story, it's not a thriller, nor a science fiction. And yet it has elements of all of those things. And I loved working with Donald Sutherland again. Donald is brilliant in every role he takes on. He always comes off as a new discovery."
Roeg pauses for a moment, and then chuckles. "Film is never disheartening. There will always be a corporate structure, but it's built on shaky foundations, and there will always be people who want to resist it. Then a tsunami hits, and the corporate structure's gone into a billion pieces. Independent filmmakers will always be there, spirit intact. It was Alice B. Toklas who once said, 'I know my work is as clear as mud, but eventually mud settles and clear waters run on.' "
but they're such a tease.....gosh when will we get to see these films!!! it's taking forever. 