STATE OF PLAY
THE FAIRY-STORY became public about this time last year (see ‘Hollywood Notes’ in Issue 41). A guy called Stel Pavlou wrote a screenplay in between selling people booze in a British off-license. When he’d finished, he posted it off to the actor he’d most like to see play one of the lead roles: Tim Roth.
To his eternal credit, Roth not only read it: he also - because he couldn’t fit it into his own schedule - sent it off to Samuel L Jackson, with whom he’d recently done Pulp Fiction. Jackson, who has been producing a lot recently in addition to a very busy acting career (see page 16 for his latest, Shaft), loved it and committed to making it, both as a producer and an actor.
Now, 12 months later, 51st State is about to go into production for Alliance Atlantis (shooting starts in Liverpool on September 25) with a budget of $28 million. Andras Hamori (eXistenZ, Sunshine) is also among the producers, and Robert Carlyle takes what was presumably the part Pavlou had in mind for Roth.
Since then, there have been subsequent drafts prepared with the help of Simon Davis Barry and David Leland, while Pavlou has quit selling booze to write a novel, Decipher, which will be published next spring.
51st State is the story of an American master chemist (Jackson) who is on the verge of retirement and heads for Liverpool to launch a new designer drug onto the European market. His contact in the Pool is a local gangster (Carlyle) who hates Americans. The director is Hong Kong action master Ronnie Yu, whose North American movies include Bride of Chucky, and the film co-stars Emily Mortimer, Ricky Tomlinson, Sean Pertwee and Meatloaf, who now seems to do as much acting as singing (he was most recently in Fight Club).
TO THE LIGHTHOUSE
AND FINALLY, A tale of perseverance above and beyond the call of duty, at any rate as far as making films is concerned. It comes from Indian cinematographer Biju Viswanath who, like film-makers the world over, pays the bills by making ads and music videos and occasionally shooting other people’s films, but dreams all the while of directing his own feature.
Biju had a script, Deja vu, about a man stranded in a lonely lighthouse who is threatened by the arrival of a silent stranger. But neither Indian nor European producers wanted to put up the money for him to make it the way he knew it had to be done. The former, says Biju, wanted “a superstar with minimum six songs and regular masala”. The latter wanted pagan rituals and elephants.
Having had some success on the festival circuit with a short film called A Voyage, Biju managed to find half the money from a businessman called Saďd Alavi whom he met at the Zanzibar International Film Festival (now there’s one that should be on everybody’s list). The rest was finally raised by prize-winning Indian editor Sreekar Prasad (whose credits include Oscar submission The Terrorist).
Meanwhile, on a trip to the UK, Biju had cast stage actor Paddy Fletcher - who works with the venerable Foots Barn theatre company - as the lighthouse-keeper, and another Brit, Simon Binns, as the mysterious stranger.
That left the lighthouse. The location search took in Lundy Island in the Bristol Channel (impossible because the shoot would have coincided with the nesting season among the island’s bird colony), Croatia, South Africa and Vladivostok, which had the perfect building but was almost totally inaccessible. Finally, the Net came to the rescue and, thanks to Tim Harrison of Lighthouse Digest magazine (no, honestly), Biju found a location on his own doorstep: the Vengurla lighthouse off the Indian coast.
Deja vu is now complete, shot from a script by British-based writer Laura Andrews on 35mm, with DTS sound - no mean achievement working on a rock accessible only after a three-hour trip in a small boat, baking hot by day, freezing cold by night, and entirely cut off for three months during the monsoon season. So, next time you hear a Hollywood actor whinge on about just how tough this or that shoot was, remember Biju. And watch out for Deja vu.
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