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taking lives
Angelina Jolie plays an FBI profiler invited to help catch a Montreal serial killer - but who is not always made welcome by the local cops. Eleanor Singer follows the trail of new thriller Taking Lives.
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What fascinated director DJ Caruso about the screenplay for Taking Lives was the way it dealt with identity. “I’m intrigued by it,” he says, “the question of who we are and who we think we are.”
It is a question which becomes central to the story of the thriller, based on a novel by British ex-pat Michael Pye, which was not only filmed in Montreal but, unusually in today’s world of one city standing in for another, actually set there as well.
The killer in Pye’s novel is a man who doesn’t just kill people: he takes over the lives of his victims for a short period of time, before tiring of that particular identity and moving on to another life, another identity, another murder. “He’s life-jacking,” says Caruso. “Not only does this guy, in his mind, become you, but he imagines he’s living your life better than you would potentially live it, and that’s part of his enjoyment.”
In Taking Lives, Angelina Jolie plays FBI agent Illeana Scott, who works for the FBI as a ‘profiler’ - a new breed of cop, popularised by best-selling crime writer Patricia Cornwell, who gets inside the head of the killers she tracks, trying to figure out how and why they did what they did and, above all, what they’re likely to do next.
The first time we see Jolie, she is stretched out full-length in a recently opened grave, getting the measure of her prey. “The killer chose this site specifically, dug it in advance. The corners are neat, symmetrical, the proportions precise…” she concludes. It’s an approach which the film’s technical adviser, a retired FBI man called Robert Ressler and one of the pioneers of profiling, admits he never actually tried but which he could well have imagined himself doing under the right circumstances.
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