Cronenberg Writes a Novel

While attending the ongoing Rome Film Festival, Canadian director David Cronenberg has mentioned that he's writing a novel.

Cronenberg has already written 60 pages. It's not horror or sci-fi, but the otherwise Canada's most famous export after Celine Dion offered few details on the project. Perhaps The Dead Ringers director will write it with novelty pens fashioned from gynecological instruments.

"Based on the pages I have written we found publishers all over the world, which is very terrifying to me," Cronenberg told reporters. "It's at a very delicate phase right now, so I can't really talk about it. It's not like Stephen King, I don't know what it's like but you wouldn't call it a horror or science fiction novel at all. But what it is exactly, well, I don't know yet."

Ghost Town [The Review]

There’s something ineffably, beautifully winning about the New York comedy. It's hard number to pull off these days. For obvious reasons. And here we have a new one, a new incarnation, just arrived – written and directed by David Koepp (writer, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull). Koepp has previously directed such spooky fare as Stir of Echoes with Kevin Bacon. He is a skilful writer – one of the most successful in Hollywood – and his directorial chops aren’t so bad either. But will this old-fashioned tale convince audiences?

Bertram Pincus (Ricky Gervais) is a dentist. He enjoys being a dentist because he hates people. When an especially talkative patient he arrives, he likes nothing better than to fill their mouth with instruments to make them shut up. When his colleague has a small party to celebrate the birth of his daughter, he’s glimpsed sneaking out without attending.

He’s mean-spirited and sardonic. He’s also something of a coward who hates physical pain, so when he goes to hospital for a routine health-check, he insists on a general anaesthetic. When he wakes up, he can see ghosts. And the ghosts all want to talk to him – a Upper East side dude in a tux who hates his widow’s new man, an old lady worried that her daughter didn’t find a letter slipped under the door, and gangland killer who wants to finish the job. There’s several dozen of them. There’s even a camp naked guy who keeps saying ‘is this a bad time?’

Pincus hates this of course. They all want favours. He doesn’t do favours. But the womanising smooth-talker in the tux (Greg Kinnear) is especially persistent; he wants Pincus to stop his wife Gwen (Tea Leoni) dating a human rights lawyer. When Pincus starts to intervene, he rather falls for Gwen as well. He succeeds in creating a problem between Gwen and her fiancé. And then regrets it.

This is familiar stuff – a curmudgeon schooled and made a better person by a series of ghostly visitations was an idea dreamt up by Charles Dickens in A Christmas Carol well over 150 years ago. The trouble here is Ricky Gervais and, to some extent, the basic interpretation of a well-worn premise. It’s a tough balancing act to make a disagreeable person sympathetic, and Gervais simply doesn’t have the acting skills to pull it off. In the UK, where Gervais is a star, this film will receive a much better reception. In the US audiences will be baffled by this dumpy, unappealing character with no social skills, a Manhattan dental fascist who nevertheless sports British teeth, a man whose ability to charm Tea Leoni seems beyond the realms of wildest fantasy.

But in the end the script doesn’t make us care enough about this man, and his redemption, and nothing Gervais could have done would ever fix that. This is another one for those long-haul flights; perfectly agreeable, quite funny in parts, but I wouldn’t pay money to see it. The New York comedy has yet to find a new form, or so it seems.

I am Still Legend

Warner Bros has greenlit a prequel to I Am Legend with both Will Smith and the original director back for second helpings.

D.B. Weiss (The Game) is writing the script based on a detailed plot outline that was developed over the past few months by writers including Smith himself

Ricky Gervais - Not Famous Enough

Ghost Town writer/director David Koepp says he regrets casting British star Ricky Gervais - because he is relatively unknown in the U.S.

He says, "The risk isn't whether people will like Ricky or not, it's whether we can get enough people who have heard of him to go to the movie.

"In England, I don't think we'll have that problem. But in the United States his shows The Office and Extras are only somewhat known. Ricky isn't an American star."

You can see Koepp talking to Vanity Fair in another interview here.

Kirsten Dunst meets a Jealous Ghost

Kirsten Dunst is starring in, and producing, a ghost story simply called Ghost. It’s based on the book by AN Wilson A Jealous Ghost

Wilson's highly literary 2005 novel describes a young American woman who travels to London to write a dissertation on Henry James' classic ghost tale, "The Turn of the Screw," and then goes to work as a nanny for two children in the British countryside. Before long she’s experiencing all-to-familiar events from the original book (read a review here).

Gonzalo Lopez-Gallego is to direct. You can read more about this project here.

A Few Good Murders

Tom Cruise may be about to cast himself as a version of Hannibal Lecter.

According to Variety, United Artists have acquired rights to serial-killer thriller "The Monster of Florence," with Cruise attached to produce and possibly to star.

Co-author of the bestseller Douglas Preston just spilled the beans in Venice.

The film would reconstruct eight grisly double homicides between 1968 and 1985 in and around the ancient city.

Fans of Anthony Hopkins’ turn as Hannibal Lecter will remember how that serial killer made Florence his home in Hannibal.

You can find Preston's website here with original crime scene pictures.

Ricky Gervais

Three Ricky Gervais factoids from this week

The Office is going to be made into a film – but only the German version into a German film

Last week he wrote to the British Prime Minister asking him to replace the bearskin hats of the famous Buckingham Palace Guards Regiments with luxuriant faux fur (Stella McCartney and Vivienne Westwood may get involved)

Gervais was hosting a series of press junkets for his new movie, Ghost Town, at the Roosevelt Hotel in Los Angeles, but left in a hurry when sudden temperature drops and ghostly women glimpsed in mirrors left him unwilling to hang around

Nicolas Cage Eats a Cockroach - no, really

One of the things I do is an occasional column for the Independent newspaper here in the UK. It looks at famous movie scenes and tells the variously hair-raising/amusing/ creepy stories behind them. The collected scenes will become a book round about this time next year, published by AC Black, a subsidiary of Bloomsbury Books, who publish the Harry Potters.

Sometimes the pieces get cut down to fill the space. It's a national newspaper. These things happen.

Here's one that was published last Friday, and since I went to some trouble to track down the director of this particular movie, I thought I'd reproduce it here in it's entirety.

Vampire’s Kiss (1989)


What’s the true story behind the early Nic Cage film where he actually eats a live cockroach? Filmmaker Robert Bierman tells me not to bother with all the Internet rumours. Still, it would be good to know.

How many takes did Cage do for the scene? Where did the actual live cockroaches come from? And which famous movie director and comedian refused to believe the scene was real in any way?

These days Bierman is better known for his work on UK television – most recently working at the helm of Waking the Dead. But back in 1989 he was in New York making a feature film about a publishing executive who believes he’s turning into a vampire. On this particular scene, Cage, now increasingly demented, sees a cockroach on the hob of his kitchen cooker, pops it in his mouth, antennae wriggling, and crunches it up.

‘In the script it had been written that he should eat a raw egg,’ Bierman recalls. ‘But a day or so before filming I’d seen a Japanese film Tampopo do the same thing. So I discussed it with Nic, and he said ‘I really want to do my room 101’ which happens to be cockroaches’.

Filming in an apartment block opposite the Gramercy Park Hotel, the props manager went down to the basement and came back with a number of bugs. ‘We had a bug beauty competition,’ says Bierman. ‘And we selected two’. There were two takes. ‘He ate it, chewed it, and after the shot spat what was left out and took a shot of 100% vodka’. Bierman asked him to do it again. ‘In fact the second take wasn’t so good, and the cockroach didn’t move enough, and Nic flicked it with his finger to try and get some life into it’.

Cage later told a journalist ‘I couldn’t really taste it, but psychologically it was murder – I couldn’t eat anything for three days. I had difficulty sleeping. Every muscle in my body didn’t want to do it, but I did it anyway’.

In those days, a year before making Wild at Heart, Cage was fearless in his commitment to acting. ‘He also ate a pigeon later on,’ says Bierman. ‘So I had to drug them so he could catch them. Filming in the late 80’s, there really were no health and safety issues. There was another scene where a bat flies around the room, and Nic had to be stopped from sending his assistant off to Central Park and catching a real one’.

Bierman was careful to shoot the scene in one unbroken shot to make it clear no trickery was involved. Even so, he later received a phone call from Mel Brooks asking him for the address of his ‘brilliant’ props man who had so expertly faked the scene. Bierman had to assure him that Cage had, in fact, eaten a real, live bug from the basement.

Tim Burton and Helena Bonham-Carter - The Addams Family of the Movie World

Tim Burton is laughing. For the master of such gothic darkness as Batman and Ed Wood, laughter isn’t exactly something you associate with the man. Hallowe’en hi-jinks maybe. A touch of glossy dark camp, of course. Yet here he is, hugging himself as a veritable belly-laugh escapes his black-clad frame. We’re in the middle of an interview in a beautiful beach pavilion on the Lido in Venice, mere hours after the world premiere of his stop-motion gem Corpse Bride . I really hadn’t meant to say anything funny. I just asked him whether Corpse Bride was in any way autobiographical.

It’s a fair point. The film concerns a gloomy and neurasthenic young man Victor (voiced by Burton regular Johnny Depp) pushed into marrying the well-heeled daughter of impoverished aristocrats (grotesque figures voiced by Albert Finney and Joanna Lumley). These people think Victor is common as muck and certainly don’t go out their way to make him feel comfortable in their stuffy mansion house. Intimidated, Victor goes for a walk and before you know it he’s actually proposed to a dead woman by mistake: the corpse bride of the title. She’s voiced by Burton’s other half and mother of his son, Helena Bonham Carter – the great-granddaughter Henry Asquith the prime minister, with sundry hereditary peers and Rothchilds amongst her near family.

‘Are you saying,’ Burton coughs and gargles, pushing his thick-rimmed tinted spectacles up his nose, ‘it’s all based on her family?’

Well it had occurred to me, I reply, nervously. Not to malign them in any way. But Burton is thoroughly entertained by the notion (later I read that Johnny Depp’s whole acting style with him is a constant effort to make him laugh). ‘Albert’s character looks exactly like her grandmother, yeah’, he exclaims, still enjoying the idea. Then he seems to collect himself, not wanting to get into trouble with the in-laws, one would assume. He puts a hand through his frizzled chestnut hair. He calms himself. ‘But no. I don’t know much about her family. We’re from such different backgrounds. I’m kind of white trash and she comes from lord and lady whatever – so it’s kind of a funny difference you know’.

It is one of the most unlikely of combinations, after all. Tim Burton had been dating the statuesque model Lisa Marie for most of the nineties, but after he worked with Helena Bonham Carter on Planet of the Apes, where she is dressed in an ape-suit, and makes an impressive primate, they began dating. He’s a Californian hipster and B-movie loving goth with a background in animation. She’s a public school girl who was for so long a kind of Merchant Ivory pin-up, forever gadding about in frocks and twirling parasols.

If cursory impressions are anything to go by, though, they clearly adore each other. They seem like two big kids having a whale of a time, during the interviews they both did and during the premiere.

Burton talked about the five years it took to make the movie, about how he doesn’t have the patience to animate any more, and relied heavily on his co-director to do the day-to-day work. He oversaw the footage on a highspeed link from Pinewood. Johnny Depp would finish work on Charlie many evenings and then step into the animated shoes of Corpse Bride.

‘I’ve always been misrepresented,’ he says. ‘You know I could dress in a clown costume and laugh with the happy people but they’d still say I’m a dark personality!’ It all dates back to his childhood, when he was a quiet little boy who liked to watch Godzilla movies.

A little later I met Helena Bonham Carter. She too feels that her image is something foisted on her by other people, though she didn’t exactly help matters by admitting to me she used to think she could ‘go back in time if I got inside the television and dressed up in costumes’ and that her first crush wasn’t someone from Duran Duran but ‘Jeremy Irons in Brideshead Revisited – I kind of stalked him, scary, then I met him once and it was all over’.

They now both live in Belsize Park, just down the road from Hampstead in London, where they are raising a two year-old son named Billy. She shows us his picture in a necklace round her neck with a flutter of her Moschino-scented hand (she’s taking him on the beach after she’s finished with us – ‘chuck him in, see if he sinks,’ she snorts, a bit Joyce Grenfell for a second). ‘It’s a lonely thing, being a director,’ she says. ‘It’s just you and you have all the responsibility’. He manages to leave most of his work in the office. ‘But he does do a lot of venting when he’s angry. And I get it. But it’s not about me’.

She did the voice-overs for both Corpse Bride and Wallace and Grommit was she was pregnant, traipsing up to Hampstead to lay down the soundtrack while Burton was down the road making Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in Pinewood. It wasn’t until she told Burton she was doing Wallace and Grommit that he piped up ‘hang on a minute I was going to ask you to do a stop-motion picture’. She laughs. ‘So it’s like London buses, two come along at once’.

How did he direct her in the movie? It’s now the fourth they’ve done together. The dynamics between couples in such situations can be tricky. History is littered with the disastrous situations of directors directing their wives followed inevitably by divorce. ‘Well he wasn’t always there,’ she recalls, ‘but he was there for the last session – he just told me to keep my voice up, since my voice is naturally quite low and he wanted a higher register. And try not to be so harsh, he said – maybe something to do with our relationship! Like I’m a husband-beater.’ And she leapt at the chance to sing a song in the movie, scored by Burton regular Danny Elfman, for my money the best composer in Hollyw ood. ‘I love show tunes,’ she exclaims brightly. ‘I’m a gay man at heart’.

Some have suggested that Burton’s work is not dark any more, since the two have become an item. Even she admits that for all its gothic and macabre flourishes, Corpse Bride is rather an optimistic movie, where the dead seem to be having a good time. Does she feel guilty about this profound change? ‘I don’t think I feel that guilty about it,’ she says, without an ounce of defensiveness. ‘I’d rather Tim was happy and other people were disappointed’.

She explains that it wasn’t until the end of filming Planet of the Apes that ‘ding and it was obvious’ and they started dating. Friends were not surprised. It was only her who hadn’t seen it. She felt ‘immediately comfortable and safe’ with him, and what was more he was more than happy to move to London, claiming that Hampstead ‘was the only place in the world I feel at home in’ after staying there during the making of Sleepy Hollow. ‘Years later he came to live there with me, it seemed like serendipity’, she says. ‘He loves the rain - the only person in England who likes the rain’. And she adds, after thinking about it, ‘he has an old soul – yeah, he’s been around the block’.

Her relationship and having a child has definitely made acting take second place, though she is also due to appear in a TV production in November called The Magnificent Seven as the mother of seven autistic children. ‘I’ve had relationships before but this is family,’ she admits. ‘Acting has definitely become a satellite activity. It’s not where I put my sense of self or self-esteem. I don’t need it to feel real’.

She likes her life now, she says. ‘I don’t need to reinvent myself or escape’. And does a return to what originally made her famous, the costume or period drama, hold any appeal these days? ‘Actually I haven’t done one since about 1998 and I wouldn’t mind doing another you know’.

Time to dust down those parasols.