|
|
| |
SPIDER STRATAGEM:
Almodóvar and Banderas (seen here camping it up in Berlin) met in Cannes to plan Tarantula, which will reunite director, actor - and actress Cruz (below left). |
IT COULD HAVE been as easy as ABC, but it wasn’t, this being the movie business. The ‘A’ is director Pedro Almodóvar, the ‘B’ is actor Antonio Banderas and the ‘C’, actress Penélope Cruz, three of the biggest names in Spanish cinema (although the latter two, of course, became big names by appearing in films made, not in Spain but in Hollywood).
They’ve all worked together in the past. Cruz was in Almodóvar’s Live Flesh and All About My Mother. And Banderas made his first-ever screen appearance in the director’s Labyrinth of Passions before getting his big break thanks to the international success of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, both made in the days when Almodóvar’s films were known for their shock value.
He’s mellowed a little these days, to judge by such recent efforts as Mother and this year’s Talk to Her. But the new project sounds as though it could have a modicum of shock value: it is called Tarantula, and is based on a French novel by Thierry Jonquet about a plastic surgeon who takes revenge on the man who rapes his daughter. I’ll leave it to your imagination to figure out which bit the plastic surgeon takes his revenge on. But it isn’t the rapist’s face.
The project, which will be made in Spanish, has apparently been under discussion for a while - possibly ever since the 1999 European Film Awards in Berlin, where Banderas presented the Best Film prize to Almodóvar for Mother and Cruz was nominated for The Girl of Your Dreams (she lost out to fellow Mother star Cecilia Roth). But it reportedly moved sharply back up the agenda when Almodóvar and Banderas had dinner at the Hotel du Cap during this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Given that all three of them are busy people, however, just how far up the agenda Tarantula has moved remains to be seen. A production start some time in 2004 seems most likely.
KATRIN CARTLIDGE:
1961-2002 |
MEANWHILE, ANOTHER director who made his name in Spanish-language films - Mexico’s Alejandro González Iñárritu - has had a hole shot in his first
GRAM PERSONS: Del Toro, Penn and
Watts will star in Iñárritu’s 21 Grams. |
English-language movie by the shocking and completely unexpected death of Katrin Cartlidge in September.
Cartlidge, who died within 48 hours of being admitted to hospital with food poisoning (which gave way to pneumonia and then developed fatally into septicaemia), was one of a number of actors due to star in Iñárritu’s 21 Grams, whose title has nothing to do with drugs but refers, with a horrid irony, to the amount of weight the body loses at the time of death (and which might just, therefore, have something to do with the spirit or the soul).
Iñárritu, who became a must-have for Hollywood’s more outward-looking producers after his extraordinary debut with Amores perros, was finally netted by former Good Machine boss Ted Hope, who will produce the film as part of the deal between his new company, This Is That, and his one-time partners, James Schamus and David Linde, who now run Universal Focus, the (dare we say it?) boutique arm of Universal. The cast will be headed by Benicio Del Toro, Sean Penn and Australian actress Naomi Watts, who shot to stardom in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive.
Script is by Guillermo Arriaga, who wrote Amores perros. And Focus, after a reported bidding war for the project with Miramax and New Regency, immediately downplayed the soulful stuff and began describing it in more down-to-earth terms, saying 21 Grams was really about an ex-prisoner, a woman and the woman’s faithless lover.
Production is due to start in a month or so (in December 2002), so by this time next year we should all know for sure what 21 Grams is really about. But if the finished film has anything like the power and skill of Amores perros, it will be well worth the wait.
|
    
|
