Strange Days (1995)
Directed by Kathryn Bigelow
Screenplay by James Cameron and Jay Cocks, story by James Cameron
Produced by James Cameron, Steven-Charles Jaffe
Running time: 145 minutes

Should I Care?
For all those movie geeks wondering how cool it would be if James Cameron and Kathryn Bigelow ever made a movie together — a sci-fi epic conceived, co-written and produced by the creator of The Terminator, Titanic and Avatar, say, put under the pressure cooker direction of the filmmaker who brought us The Hurt Locker — then fan boy, have I got a movie for you. Strange Days latches onto three potent ideas weighing heavy on the minds of its filmmakers in the early 1990s: better-than-virtual reality playback technology, police brutality and what the party of the millennium was going to look like. On a gut level, the movie is Space Mountain meets cyberpunk, grabbing us and rocketing us into a near future we end up being thankful to just be visiting. It’s a stiff shot of espresso, thick with brutal violence and sleazy characters that held little to zero appeal for audiences at the time, but at the very least, this is an exhilarating vision, more remarkable that it went into production before anyone (except maybe Cameron) had ever used email before.

Whether the writing or the editing is at fault (Howard E. Smith cut the movie with an uncredited Cameron), there is too much tech noir and not enough cohesiveness to make the film great. Juliette Lewis plays a super skank for all time and though fun to watch slink around, her character is never a girl we believe Ralph Fiennes would be smitten with. Fiennes — posed to become a star following Quiz Show — plays a sort of magician, tantalizing but difficult to care about behind all the smoke and mirrors. He’s paired with a chiseled Angela Bassett who seems capable of busting his nose open at any moment. The obligatory music biz subplot and shots of a militarized Los Angeles don’t feel very genuine, but as evidenced by cyber junk like Johnny Mnemonic, The Net or Virtuosity, Strange Days is not only more powerful than it needed to be, but deeper. Substitute YouTube for “clips” and the filmmakers might have been onto something here. Graeme Revell and French techno group Deep Forest take us into the near future with a musical score that’s nothing short of sublime.

So, What’s This About?
At 1:06:27 am on 30 December 1999, Lenny Nero (Ralph Fiennes) samples the wares of a hustler (Richard Edson) who procures the illegal drug of the near future: “clips”, mini-discs formatted by the Superconducting Quantum Interference Device (SQUID), an apparatus that when fitted atop a user’s head, records directly off their cerebral cortex, using the optical nerve as a camera lens. Developed as an upgrade on surveillance wires, SQUID also permits users to “jack in” to clips of people’s personal lives and experience them raw. A former vice cop, Lenny is now a black market operator who traffics in these clips. He spends his personal time reliving happier days through clips of his ex-girlfriend Faith (Juliette Lewis), a rock singer who left him for music mogul Philo Gant (Michael Wincott). Lenny’s remaining friends are a wily ex-cop turned private eye (Tom Sizemore) and stoic bodyguard Lornette “Mace” Mason (Angela Bassett) whose protection service caters to VIPs visiting anarchic Los Angeles.

As millennium celebrations near and tensions between Angelenos and the LAPD boil under the surface, a prostitute friend of Faith’s named Iris (Brigitte Bako) begs Lenny for help. While he uses the encounter as an excuse to contact Faith, Iris is raped and strangled by a killer who records the act with a SQUID and taunts Lenny by sending him a clip of the murder. Lenny and Mace discover that Iris was in possession of a clip of her own: the execution of a militant rapper named Jeriko One (Glenn Plummer) at the hands of two rogue police officers (Vincent D’Onofrio, William Fichtner) during a traffic stop. After the same cops come after Lenny and Mace, Faith admits that her record producer boyfriend’s paranoia drove him to use Iris to spy on Jeriko One with a SQUID. Mace considers going public with the clip of Jeriko One’s shooting, even if it ignites a revolution and burns L.A. to the ground. With Philo holding his ex-girlfriend, Lenny intends to trade the clip for Faith. But as the year 2000 approaches, nothing is what it seems.

Who Made It?
In 1985, James Cameron became intrigued with the idea of giving the film noir genre a high tech polish. Taking a central element of the genre, a big city loser seeking redemption, Cameron set his tale against a doomsday scenario rising out of the New Year’s Eve celebrations of the year 1999. He scribbled less than five pages of notes and put the script idea — which he was calling The Magic Man — aside. Cameron rapidly transitioned from the unexpected success of The Terminator, his first real film as a writer-director, to one groundbreaking science fiction thriller after another: Aliens, The Abyss and Terminator 2: Judgment Day, placing him among a filmmaking elite after five credits as a director. In late 1992, with millennium approaching and Cameron already committed to direct True Lies next, he pitched The Magic Man to his ex-wife Kathryn Bigelow, who’d just directed an action film Cameron script doctored and executive produced titled Point Break.

Kathryn Bigelow grew up in Northern California. Planning to emulate her father — an aspiring cartoonist who managed a paint store — Bigelow studied painting at the San Francisco Art Institute and through a scholarship to the Whitney Independent Study Program, moved to New York. One day, she took in a double bill of Mean Streets and The Wild Bunch and decided to study filmmaking. A well received short film at Columbia in 1978 titled The Set-Up led to a feature film in 1982: the brooding motorcycle melodrama The Loveless, which Bigelow cast Willem Dafoe in his first film. Near Dark, Blue Steel and Point Break placed her in the rarified air of women directing action films in Hollywood. Budgeted at roughly $42 million, Strange Days was Bigelow’s most ambitious project to date. The intense mix of sci-fi, film noir and social commentary failed to draw a wide audience, but has grown in status as a cult classic among critics and moviegoers.

How’d They Do It?
Nine years before Strange Days would go into production, James Cameron started with what amounted to five pages of handwritten notes. In the introduction to the published version of his “scriptment”, Cameron wrote “In this preliminary sketch, the story consisted of a street hustler, a loser name Lenny Nero, who is squired around the urban decay of future L.A. by an unwilling limo driver, a woman named ‘Mace’ Mason. He is a black market buyer and seller of human experience, recorded and played back directly into the brain, and he enters a dance of death with a psychotic killer, who seems to be homing in relentlessly on Lenny’s ex-girlfriend, Faith, whom Lenny has difficulty protecting because she won’t have anything to do with him. I called it The Magic Man, because Lenny can get you anything, like magic. I never got around to writing it, at least not that decade. The remarkable thing , when I look at those pathetic handwritten scrawls now, is how the basic template of the story never changed, despite the long odyssey of getting from those notes to a shooting script in 1994.”

He continued, “Sometime in late 1992 I pitched this idea to Kathryn Bigelow. It had lain dormant all those years as one of those things that I knew I would get around to sooner or later but never did. I began to worry that if I waited too long, the millenium would no longer be far enough off to be science fiction. So with two directing projects looming in front of me (True Lies and Spiderman) which would take me into the mid-nineties, I decided to let another director take over a piece that was near and dear to me. Kathryn, with her edgy visual style, was the obvious choice.” In addition to being her ex-husband, Cameron had enjoyed collaborating with Bigelow on Point Break and trusted her ability to shoot a film on schedule and on budget, which was more than Cameron could say for himself. He added, “In addition, she is that aria raris in mainstream filmmaking — a director who cares deeply about the characters while approaching the material with an intensely visual style. Fortunately, Kathryn liked the pitch and turned down her other offers, agreeing to sit and wait while I wrote the script.”

Discussing her fifth film for the press kit in 1995, Bigelow recalled, “It was a tremendous piece that offered so many opportunities. When I first became involved with Strange Days four years ago, I saw a way to draw one possible future, think about it and maybe derail it; imagine it and feel it as you watch. Is this the end of the world or the beginning of another one? That’s the core of Strange Days and what moved me –compelled me — to make it. Those themes, and these characters: a hustler with an undiscovered conscience and a guide through the underworld who has the strength, and the love, to survive. The interlocking story of Lenny and Mace becomes a parable in noirish disguise, a story about the pervasive need to watch, to see. It calibrates the fragile balance between viewer and viewed, screen and audience, spectacle as medium and subject. It puts us all in the picture.” Bigelow waited while Cameron labored over a draft for what was turning into the most densely plotted and character driven script he’d attempted.

Cameron recalled, “I couldn’t crack the plot to save my life. Kathryn had added her own spin to the piece, opening up the story and giving it thematic weight by having the murder tapes lead inexorably to an explosive incident involving the LAPD and a potential race riot of Biblical proportions. This concept fit well with my idea for a megaparty that teeters on the edge of complete social collapse, but it was proving very snaky trying to integrate it with the film noir erotic-thriller love story.” Over five weeks beginning in January 1993, Cameron broke through eight years of creative dithering with what he came to refer to as a “scriptment”. Running 131 pages in this case, Cameron elaborated, “So what you have in your hands is at once a kind of pathetic document; it is as long as a script, but messy and undisiplined, full of cheats and glossed over sections. But it is also an interesting snapshot of formatting a moment in the creative process. It contains notes and references and textures that do not exist in the finished script. It takes the time to gaze around at a grim future world and paint it in neon colors, it gets the mood first, then tells the story.”

Due to his commitment to True Lies, Cameron wasn’t available to translate his scriptment into a first draft screenplay, He hired Jay Cocks to whip a script into shape. “Between Jay and Kathryn, ideas flew like crazy — visualize whirled peas. Their restructuring of my unweidly piece was efficient and focused, while retaining the style of the meandering, quirky dialogue. They wrote it down to a manageable length and shaped it into Kathryn’s vision. Though Jay and I did very little writing together, we are both proud of the collaboration.” Cocks had worked with Bigelow on an unproduced Joan of Arc epic titled Company of Angels that had Winona Ryder attached to play the martyred warrior. Of Strange Days, Cocks recalled, “We didn’t want to do tech and glitz. We wanted to do street. And we wanted to give a very vivid sense of a city in terminal social disorder. And a society really on the razor’s edge.” He added, “I came to this from more of a Raymond Chandler angle than a William Gibson angle.”

Finding camera equipment capable of simulating the near future world of Strange Days from the point of view of someone jacked into a SQUID became a formidable technical hurdle to bound before production could begin. In a lecture on the film’s opening sequence which is packaged as an audio commentary on the film’s laserdisc and DVD releases, Bigelow explained, “No existing camera was going to give me — I tested every camera out there, even the smallest, lightest one that was available to me, like an IMO, would give me that would replicate that kind of incredible mobility that the human eye has. When you just look around the room and you take for granted the kind of very fragile flexible mobility that the human eye has. So, we started out by realizing no camera would accomplish this that existed out there so we had no build a camera. This was about a year before we started to shoot. And we built a camera that literally could fit in the palm of your hand. It weighed 8 pounds, it was 35 millimeter, with interchangable lenses — prime lenses — and we outfitted it with a kind of modified Steadicam rig, which enabled you to give you the kind of fluidity of Steadicam.”

Bigelow added, “So I needed, if we simply did it handheld, you’d be throwing up in the audience watching that, I mean literally, you’d need airsick bags. I mean, this was just one challenge in making this. So what I did was I gave it a, there’s a piece of equipment that I used for Point Break — there’s a foot chase in that — called the pogo cam, which is a camera that weighs 18 pounds, which is gyro stablized, but it has no through-the-lens eyepiece, it has just a kind of wire on top of the camera so you kind of vaguely know what you’re framing. So I wanted to kind of give the Steadicam a pogo attiude and the pogo cam is just something you simply run with, it’s on a stick, camera’s on a stick, and it has a gyro stabilizer at the bottom. We kind of adapted some elements from the pogo cam to the Steadicam with this new 8 pound camera and there we finally had — this I’m talking a year, with a lot of experimentation — to finally have a camera that could execute this which I know looks really simple. But it wasn’t.”

Strange Days commenced shooting June 1994 in Los Angeles, with Cameron and Steven-Charles Jaffe producing under Cameron’s Lightstorm Entertainment banner for 20^th Century Fox. The 80-day schedule called for 77 days of night photography, including the massive New Year’s Eve bash. On Saturday, September 27, a four block area at 5^th and Figueroa in front of the Westin Bonaventure Hotel became New Year’s Eve 1999. Concert promoters Moss Jacobs and Philip Blaine were put on the payroll to organize an event, which featured performances by Dee-Lite and Aphex Twin and many more techno groups. With tickets running $10 a pop, the event was set to kick off at 9pm and run until dawn. Between 10,000 and 12,000 revelers showed up, two stadium sized video screens were brought in, several hundred fireworks exploded, 2,000 balloons released and a half-ton of confetti showered the scene. Jaffe recalled, “We had several hundred people organizing this, from our crew to security people to the police. It took a behemoth effort to pull this all together.”

Screened at the Venice Film Festival in September and New York Film Festival the following month, Strange Days opened October 1995 in the United States. Critics seemed won over by the director, if not her film. Janet Maslin, The New York Times: “One thing for certain about the furiously talented Ms. Bigelow: No one will ever say she directs like a girl … Only when it comes time to justify its excesses and deliver on a promise of wider revelation does the otherwise audacious screenplay by James Cameron and Jay Cocks look too specific and small.” Steve Davis, The Austin Chronicle: “Although there are some exhilarating moments here, they’re offset by frequent distractions: Lewis’ standard (and now boring) weird performance, an occasional lack of logic in the story line, a tendency to go operatic, and the overall feeling that the movie is unsure of where it is going.” Roger Ebert, The Chicago Sun Times: “Strange Days does three things that will make it a cult film. It creates a convincing future landscape; it populates it with a hero who comes out of the noir tradition and is flawed and complex rather than simply heroic, and it provides a vocabulary … At the same time, depending more on mood and character than logic, the movie backs into an ending that is completely implausible.”

With $7.9 million at the U.S. box office, Strange Days was lumped in by The New York Times with several “big budget flops” released around the same time: Assassins, Jade, The Scarlet Letter. In an unspecified interview, Bigelow maintained, “If you hold a mirror up to society, and you don’t like what you see, you can’t fault the mirror. It’s a mirror. I think that on the eve of the millennium, a point in time only four years from now, the clock is ticking, the same social issues and racial tensions still exist, the environment still needs reexamination so you don’t forget it when the lights come up. Strange Days is provocative. Without revealing too much, I would say that it feels like we are driving toward a highly chaotic, explosive, volatile, Armageddon-like ending. Obviously, the riot footage came out of the L.A. riots. I mean, I was there. I experienced that.” She added, “The toughest decision was not wanting to shy away from anything, trying to keep the truth of the moment, of the social environment. It’s not that I condone violence. I don’t. It’s an indictment. I would say the film is cautionary, a wake-up call, and that I think is always valuable.”

Where’d You Get All of This?
Strange Days Press Kit

Strange Days. By James Cameron. Plume (1995)

Strange Days. DVD audio commentary by Kathryn Bigelow. 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment (2002)

Heaven’s Gate (1980)
Directed by Michael Cimino
Written by Michael Cimino
Produced by Joann Carelli
Running time: 219 minutes (original cut)

Should I Care?
As the 1970s came to a close, five runaway film productions loomed on the horizon, piling up doom and gloom courtesy of the mainstream news media. Suffering from fiscal recklessness at best, studio mismanagement at worst, if the poor buzz was to be believed, these five big budget movies were determined to bankrupt Hollywood: Apocalypse Now, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, 1941, The Blues Brothers and Heaven’s Gate. Four of these would-be disasters quickly recouped their heavy costs at the box office. The one that didn’t make it into the black seems to have been conveniently lost in time along with its infamous director. That would be Michael Cimino and the movie would be Heaven’s Gate, a 3 ½ hour western of pictorial brilliance, almost unparalleled scope, outstanding performances and haunting grandeur. For all his excesses and notoriety, Cimino captures a certain lyrical beauty missing in epic filmmaking since the passing of David Lean.

It’s time to call Heaven’s Gate what it is: the last great American film of the 1970s. Cimino’s screenplay not only paints the Old West with the contours I imagine actually existed there — crowdedness and expanse, serenity and violence, beauty and ugliness – but fills that landscape with intriguing characters and dialogue of surprising depth. Kris Kristofferson leads a fairly overlooked cast of talented character actors, all of whom are elevated above the din and clamor of the massive production and are enabled to deliver excellent performances. Few movies recreate a bygone era with the detail of this one, with Vilmos Zsigmond overseeing the majestic cinematography and David Mansfield composing a staggering musical score. Unlike so many turkeys that truly qualify for “worst ever” status, the craftsmanship here is never in question. For all the money spent on Heaven’s Gate, we can see exactly where the bucks ended up and why.

So, What’s This About?
In Cambridge, Massachusetts, the Harvard College graduating class of 1870 — which includes James Averill (Kris Kristofferson) — assembles to hear their class orator Billy Irvine (John Hurt) speak. Irvine rejects the high-minded ideals sewn by the reverend doctor of the university (Joseph Cotten), and advises his fellow classmates to merely rise no further than each of them is capable. 20 years later, Averill arrives by train in Casper, Wyoming after transporting an immigrant woman to St. Louis to be hanged. Averill is sheriff of Johnson County, pristine territory which more Polish, German and Ukrainian immigrants seem to be pouring into every day.

By the time Averill visits a saloon operated by his friend John Bridges (Jeff Bridges) in the town of Sweetwater, the sheriff learns that the local cattle association, led by the unscrupulous Frank Canton (Sam Waterston) has drawn up the names of 125 settlers suspected of cattle rustling or troublemaking and put them on a death list. The most efficient assassin on the cattleman’s payroll is Nathan Champion (Christopher Walken), who roams Johnson County executing immigrants who’ve stolen livestock. Meanwhile, Averill returns to his pastoral home and to his girlfriend Ella Watson (Isabelle Hupert), who operates a bordello and accepts stolen cattle as payment.

After adjourning to the town reception hall — Heaven’s Gate, which hosts music and roller skating — Averill asks Ella to leave the county, not wanting to tell her that her name is on the death list. Champion, who in addition to being one of Ella’s customers is also in love with her, offers to take her away under the protection of his men (Geoffrey Lewis and Mickey Rourke). She rejects both offers and chooses to stay in Sweetwater. Three mercenaries intercept Ella at her place of business and attempt to scratch her name off the death list. Standing behind Averill and Champion, the rest of the town elects to stay their ground and attempt to repel the invaders.

Who Should Be Held Responsible?
In 1971, a filmmaker no one in Hollywood had heard of — putting his pictorial eye and camera skills to use in New York directing commercials for Kodak, Pepsi and United Airlines — wrote a screenplay titled The Johnson County War. The screenwriter was Michael Cimino and his script was loosely based on a range war that took place in 1892 between cattle ranchers and settlers, many of them immigrants, who flowed into Johnson County, Wyoming after passage of the Homestead Act. Producer David Foster set the project up at Fox, only to have production head Jere Henshaw put it into turnaround in 1972. Henshaw later told American Film, “It looked to us like a pretty downbeat story at a pretty heavy cost.”

An idiosyncratic caper Cimino wrote titled Thunderbolt and Lightfoot fared much better, with Clint Eastwood enjoying the script enough to gamble on the first time director. Co-starring Jeff Bridges, the picture was very favorably reviewed and a modest box office hit in the summer of 1974. Four years later, Cimino was riding a tidal wave of industry buzz for his second film, an ode to brotherhood and sacrifice set against the Vietnam War titled The Deer Hunter. Among those in Hollywood who were high on the movie was David Field, a production executive for United Artists, who later recalled, “We saw an advanced print of Deer Hunter — I don’t know how many weeks before it was released — and we were blown away.”

Cimino’s agent submitted a package for his client’s next film — The Johnson County War — to United Artists. The studio’s head of production Danton Rissner read the script in August 1978 and responded coolly it. His story department concluded: “If it were not for Cimino, I would pass.” What distinguished the script from the typical western was its assertion that the United States government had sanctioned the range war in what amounted to ethnic genocide. Rissner remained dubious that theater exhibitors would welcome such liberal revisionism of a fading genre. But by September, UA agreed to a pay-or-play package of $1.7 million for The Johnson County War: $250,000 for Cimino’s script, $500,000 for Cimino’s directing services, $100,000 for Cimino’s producing partner Joann Carelli and $850,000 for Kris Kristofferson to star, all to be paid whether the movie was made or not.

Cimino continued to tune his script. He inserted a prologue introducing the characters of Averill and Billy Irvine at Harvard 20 years before the events in Wyoming, and added a brief epilogue, taking place 10 years after the range war. Averill is moored in a yacht off the coast of Rhode Island, still haunted by the events of the film. The script concluded with the quote, “What one loves about life are the things that fade.” Cimino had also arrived on a new title, and in April 1979, one week after The Deer Hunter won five Academy Awards including Best Picture, principal photography began on Heaven’s Gate. Glacier National Park in Kalispell, Montana had been selected as a filming location and a release date of December 1979 set. The accelerated schedule dictated a budget of $11.5 million, $15 million at most.

Recalling Cimino’s exacting work methods, director of photography Vilmos Zsigmond stated, “It was very unusual the way he worked. He would actually paint by selecting extras and put them in the right place in a set. It was like a painter would paint them. He painted by picking up people and put them into the right place. Then, once we started to shoot, you know, sometimes we would go for three takes, sometimes you would go for ten takes. And many, many times you had to go for forty takes.” In the first six days of shooting, Cimino had fallen five days behind schedule, with roughly 90 seconds of usable footage in the can. After 12 days, Heaven’s Gate was 10 days behind schedule.

In his book Final Cut, Steven Bach recounted the expenses that began accumulating: “It was true, as later press reports informed, that Michael Cimino was building sets and rebuilding them, hiring 100 extras, then 200, then 500, adding horses and wagons and hats, shoes, gloves, dresses, top hats, bridles, boots, roller skates, babushkas, aprons, dusters, buckboards, gun belts, rifles, bullets, cows, calves, bulls, trees, thousands of tons of dirt, hundreds of miles of exposed film, and all this mattered economically. But what mattered most was that what he was adding was takes and retakes and retakes of the retakes. And retakes of those. Michael Cimino was taking — and retaking — time. Getting it right.”

To get it right, Cimino was shooting as many as 30 takes of shots and printing nearly every one, burning through $200,000 a day and $1 million per week. Actor Brad Dourif recalled, “I’m not used to seeing fifty seven takes. I’m really not. I’m not used to doing a minimum of thirty-two takes. He wanted to try a bunch of different ways. It was like workshopping on film, you know, we did the happy version, we did the crying version, we did the furious version. I mean, each scene was taken to these degrees, beyond which you weren’t going for the ultimate take, you were going for a lot of choices.” At its current pace, Heaven’s Gate was on track to exceed its budget by 500% and end up costing United Artists a then stellar sum of $35 million.

The studio got its first peek at Heaven’s Gate on June 6, 1979 when Bach and David Field made the trip to Kalispell to view about 30 minutes of the film. Bach recalled, “The footage was ravishing. There was nothing that anybody on Earth could say to criticize the footage, so we knew it wasn’t the case of a production that was falling apart. We never thought it was a case of Michael sitting in his trailer eating chocolates and watching television when he should have been out on the set. That was never the issue. The issue was we didn’t agree that you could take this much time to achieve perfection. And if you continue to take this much time to achieve perfection, you’re going to break our bank and there’s not going to be any company to release the picture.”

Jeff Bridges later offered his recollection of the production by stating, “From somebody on the outside it would look like it was almost too much, but it never appeared that way to me. It was like, this guy really cares.” But with John Hurt due to start work on The Elephant Man in October 1979 and the mountain roads in Montana closing for winter, Cimino heeded United Artists’ pleas to pick up the pace. UA pushed the release of the film back a year, settling on Christmas 1980. The studio planned exclusive reserved seating 70mm print engagements in New York, Los Angeles and Toronto for November 1980. Heaven’s Gate would then expand to additional cities in December before a general release in February 1981 to benefit from the many Academy Award nominations the film industry would naturally bestow on the picture.

On June 26, 1980, after eight months of editing, Cimino was ready to show United Artists the film. Studio executives assembled in Los Angeles for a private screening. Bach recalled, “I thought Michael looked exhausted, truly, truly depleted. I remember asking, ‘How close are we to a final cut?’ And he said, ‘It’s a little long. I can lose maybe fifteen minutes.’ And we sat down and we watched the movie. And the movie that we saw was five hours and 25 minutes long. The battle sequence alone was as long as most feature motion pictures. I was angry, I was angry, I was angry. The company had been put through turmoil … And the internal hope that had kept us all going for those two or three years at this process now — which was that it was going to be a masterpiece, and that would justify everything that we had gone through — was suddenly gone.”

By mid-October, Cimino had Heaven’s Gate down to 3 hours and 39 minutes. No one at United Artists bothered viewing his cut until its public unveiling in New York one month later. Jeff Bridges recalled, “I can remember going to the first screening, the premiere in New York, and we were all very excited and Mike was quite anxious because I don’t know if he even saw the film before it was shown, you know, it was wet right out of the soup. He had just put it together and just barely made the deadline to get it all together. And the movie comes on. I remember my first impression of seeing it was, you know, kind of the splendor of it was wonderful, but the rhythm of it was so unusual and so kind of slow and not what you expected to see that the audience certainly was frustrated. And you hear that [smattering of applause] terrible applause at the end. Ugh, it was terrible.”

The next morning, Michael Cimino, Joann Carelli and Bridges were on their way to Toronto for the next screening when they picked up a copy of the New York Times. The opening paragraph of Vincent Canby’s review read: “Heaven’s Gate fails so completely, you might suspect Mr. Cimino sold his soul to the devil to obtain the success of The Deer Hunter, and the devil has just come around to collect.” Brad Dourif recalled, “Well I read Vincent Canby’s — I don’t read reviews, that’s the first thing — I read Vincent Canby’s because it actually had the line in it, ‘like being given a four-hour tour of your own living room’ and I just wanted to see how bad a review could be and it was really scathing. Angry review. I mean, basically, everything that people hated about the direction of film was piled onto Michael.”

Interviewed by Jean-Luc Godard in 1982, film critic Pauline Kael defended the stoning Heaven’s Gate was given in the mainstream media. “I did think Canby’s review was rather brutal. On the other hand, the fact is the picture does not have one good scene, or one good character, and it goes on for several hours. I think it’s very interesting visually, but there is nothing that can carry it with an audience. If the company had thought that the critics were wrong, they would have put in millions in advertising and they might have recouped on the picture. A lot of terrible movies get by if the companies believe in them … But they were dismayed because they could see the justice of what the reviewers were saying, that there was nothing there.”

Steven Bach disagreed. “I think the critics were reviewing the production history. They were rewriting their reviews for The Deer Hunter, which they thought they had over praised. They were getting back at what they perceived as hostile treatment from the director. I think they were slapping United Artists for having allowed this to happen. But I never felt that there was a real serious attempt to see what is this picture trying to do and does it succeed on its own terms. It didn’t succeed on the terms they wanted to lay on the picture and that was what they were writing about, was their terms for the picture, not the picture’s terms.” After playing for a week in New York, Cimino took out ads in Variety and The Hollywood Reporter asking UA to withdraw the film from release so he could rework his 219-minute cut.

A 149-minute version of Heaven’s Gate opened in 810 theaters nationwide in April 1981. But audiences ignored it completely, buying $3.4 million in tickets in the United States. Tom Brokaw introduced a segment on Heaven’s Gate for the NBC Nightly News by proclaiming “a $40 million film from an Oscar winning director may be the biggest bomb in Hollywood history.” The loss to United Artists was tabulated at $44 million. Within a month, Transamerica decided it was done with the movie business and sold UA to rival studio MGM. Michael Cimino and Kris Kristofferson were at the Cannes Film Festival in May when the news broke. UA’s new president Norbert Auerbach maintained that while Heaven’s Gate had not been directly responsible for the collapse of the prestigious 62-year-old studio, the movie hadn’t steered UA away from disaster either.

Naturally, the first audiences to appreciate Heaven’s Gate were French. In December 1982, celebrated film magazine Cahiers du Cinema sponsored a screening of Cimino’s 219-minute cut in Paris. Word reached Los Angeles, where Jerry Harvey and Fred Grossbud of pay cable’s Z Channel persuaded MGM/UA to let them air the long version of Heaven’s Gate starting on Christmas Eve. It marked the first time a wide audience had been permitted to see the film at its original length. In the Los Angeles Times — whose film critic Kevin Thomas had been one of the few to submit a rave review of Heaven’s Gate while it was in theaters — Charles Champlin wrote, “Not a damn thing was gained economically by forcing Cimino to eviscerate his work, but audiences were denied the chance to see fully whatever it was that Cimino had in mind.”

In August 1983, England’s National Film Theatre booked the long version of Heaven’s Gate for six performances, with Cimino on hand to introduce the film. Derek Malcolm wrote in The Guardian: “The full version, I can assure you, is quite an experience – an extraordinary attempt to make a major American movie at a time when only the minors held sway.” The long version was released theatrically at the Plaza 2 theater in London, but its box office was so negligible that MGM/UA nixed plans to re-release the uncut Heaven’s Gate elsewhere. Michael Cimino — who has not directed since 1996 and refuses requests to discuss his infamous magnum opus — had this to say in 1990:  “I would respond to Heaven’s Gate the same way Jack Kennedy responded to the Bay of Pigs. I’d take full responsibility and all other questions are answered by the film itself.”

Where Are You Getting This?
Final Cut: Dreams and Disaster in the Making of Heaven’s Gate by Steven Bach (1985)

Final Cut: The Making and Unmaking of Heaven’s Gate (2004), directed by Michael Epstein

The Limey (1999)
Written by Lem Dobbs
Directed by Steven Soderbergh
Produced by John Hardy, Scott Kramer
Running time: 89 minutes

Should I Care?
Taking a look at a movie, stepping back and taking a look at it again benefits few films as thoroughly as The Limey, the fractured, hard boiled egg that director Steven Soderbergh whipped up on break between two studio assignments near the end of the first decade of his career. Pocketing some well earned critical cache for thrusting two stars of the 1960s — Terence Stamp and Peter Fonda — back into the limelight with screen roles they could sink their chops into, a non-linear timeline that reduces the story and characters to sketches could be described as an acquired taste at best. But like the director’s glacially paced remake of Solaris (2002) and the eccentric double feature Che (2008), The Limey is a movie whose suggested usage recommends time to chew it over. That’s the ideal approach for a film about time. Focusing on a British career criminal past his expiration date whose trip to L.A. conjures memories — and finally regrets — of what his life might have been, this is intricately well made, poignant and exciting filmmaking.

Screenwriter Lem Dobbs — who had Richard Stark paperback novels like The Hunter on his brain when he initially wrote the script in his early 20s — has reason to snipe about what Soderbergh came out of the editing room with. Supporting characters perfectly cast in Lesley Ann Warren, Nicky Katt and Barry Newman are shouldered out of the movie, while Ann-Margret’s entire performance hit the cutting room floor. At 89 minutes, it’s hard to see how restoring 10 minutes to the running time would have lost anybody. Entire layers of the story feel unexposed: contrasts between L.A. and London, upper and working class, the ‘60s and the ‘90s. Soderbergh seems after a little less conversation and instead juxtaposes moving images, moving adroitly through a man’s memory to examine all these subjects and more. Employing footage of a 27-year-old Stamp from the film Poor Cow (1967) for flashbacks was an inspired choice, while the low key piano score by Cliff Martinez haunts the action beautifully.

So, What’s This About?
A taciturn stranger (Terence Stamp) who speaks at times in rhyming Cockney slang and gives the name of “Wilson” exits Los Angeles International Airport. He seeks out Eduardo Roel (Luis Guzman), an acting class friend of his daughter Jenny (Melissa George) and sender of the letter notifying Wilson that his daughter has died. Refusing to believe that her neck was broken in a car accident on Mulholland Drive, Wilson pays a visit to the drug traffickers Jenny confronted when she discovered her boyfriend was doing business with them. Unaware that Wilson has spent half of his life in British prisons for armed robbery, the petty thieves pay dearly for their rudeness. Word reaches Jenny’s ex, Terry Valentine (Peter Fonda), a music producer who built a fortune capturing the allure of Southern California on vinyl records in the late 1960s. Valentine now lives in a house suspended over the Hollywood Hills with his current baby-faced flame Adhara (Amelia Heinle).

Spending time with Jenny’s best friend and acting instructor Elaine (Lesley Ann Warren), Wilson reveals that his daughter often threatened to dial the police on him during his wilder days in London. This was her way to showing her love for him. Wilson believes a similar occurrence with her ex-boyfriend led to Jenny’s death. Crashing a party at Valentine’s, Wilson throws one of the record producer’s muscle men into the canyon and narrowly evades a loaded for bear security consultant named Jim Avery (Barry Newman) who protects Valentine. Avery outsources the hit on Wilson to a pool hall punk (Nicky Katt) who blows his assignment when the narcs monitoring Valentine intervene. Unable to prove Valentine is involved in drug smuggling, a DEA agent (Bill Duke) instead provides Wilson with the location of their quarry. Wilson, Eduardo and Elaine head up the coast to Big Sur, where Valentine is hiding out and Wilson seeks the truth about his daughter’s death.

Who Made It?
The son of American painter R.B. Kitaj, Anton Lemuel Kitaj was born in Oxford and grew up in London in the 1960s. He settled in Los Angeles toward the end of the 1970s, adopted the pen name Lem Dobbs (a nod to The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, one of his favorite films) and started cranking out screenplays. One in particular was influenced by the pulp fiction of Donald Westlake, whose novel The Hunter (written under the non de plume Richard Stark) and its vengeance wrecking anti-hero would coincidentally inspire at least two movies with fractured timelines: Point Blank (1967) and later Payback (1999). Titled The Limey, nothing much became of Dobbs’ script, but a decade later, the screenwriter found a fan in director Steven Soderbergh, who filmed a screenplay Dobbs had written as homage to German horror movies of the 1920s. Dobbs became a vocal critic of Kafka (1991), but was approached by Soderbergh with the prospect of making The Limey as soon as the director finished his third film, King of the Hill (1993).

Wrapping an adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s crime novel Out of Sight (1998) for Universal Pictures, Soderbergh wanted to go back to work, as well as experiment with techniques he was tempted to workshop on his $48 million studio assignment. Dobbs was game to help remodel The Limey less in the style of a straightforward crime thriller and into something deeper. At a much earlier stage, Dobbs had Michael Caine in mind for the role of Wilson, but Terence Stamp was chosen as the ‘60s screen icon they wanted to build the film around. Basking in the warmest reviews of his career for Out of Sight, Soderbergh approached upstart, filmmaker friendly Artisan Entertainment in June 1998 with a script and a cast for The Limey. The mini-studio agreed to finance a roughly $9 million budget and nine months later, the dexterous filmmaker would turn in his cut of the film. Shunned by audiences, the fragmented film noir would come to be regarded by many critics and filmgoers as a career best for both Dobbs and Soderbergh.

How’d They Do It?
Emigrating from London to Los Angeles permanently at the age of 18, one of the earliest scripts Lem Dobbs finished was The Limey. “I remember when I first wrote this script, and I was living in my little apartment in Hollywood, a block from Paramount Studios. Around the corner there was an office building on Larchmont and I was walking by and I looked at the directory outside and it said, ‘Aldrich and Associates’. And the minute this script — the original, naïve, adolescent version — was hot off the Xerox machine I took a copy around to Robert Aldrich’s office and gave it to his secretary and said, ‘This is for Mr. Aldrich’ and I’d written a letter or something and I still think to this day if one thing had led to another and he’d read it and liked it and called me and somehow the movie had gotten made it would have added years to his life, it would have resurrected his critical reputation.” Dobbs added, “But it shows you how long it can be before a movie comes together and it’s strange to think that I’m saying now that you brought a script to Robert Aldrich. You might as well be invoking the name of D.W. Griffith.”

Leaning heavily on the novels of Richard Stark and action movies directed by Walter Hill, as well as British film noir  — Dobbs cites Michael Caine in Get Carter (1971) and the TV mini-series Out (1978) starring Tom Bell as influences — the script made its way to Steven Soderbergh, whose debut film sex, lies and videotape (1989) won the Palm d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival when the director was 26 years old. Soderbergh recalled, “This is the script he had for a while, and that we talked about doing after King of the Hill. But we sort of let it drop. After Out Of Sight, I called him up again: I really wanted to go back to work immediately, but I wanted to do something small where I could continue to experiment a little with narrative. There were things I thought of during Out of Sight where I remember thinking, ‘Wow, you could go a lot further with some of these ideas if you had a piece of material that could withstand it.’ So I called Lem. I said, ‘Look, let’s think about this again, but I want to come at it a different way. I want to make it more of a mosaic and sort of deconstruct it a little bit, and let’s figure out now who the actor is that we’re going to design this around, because there aren’t a lot of choices.’”

Promoting The Limey in 1999, Soderbergh revealed, “I thought, I would love to see a movie in which Terence Stamp is the lead character, so that’s what I was thinking. But I also knew that we had a movie in which 95 percent of the dialogue was spoken by characters 50 and older, and that’s not exactly where the core demographic is lately. One of the things that I liked about the script was that Terence Stamp’s daughter, Jenny, had a really close friend who was not her age. Lem Dobbs, the writer and I were talking about that and he was saying, ‘You know, I have friends of all different ages, but I feel like when I go to see a movie, everybody’s friend is exactly the same age.’ We became very enamored of the idea of Jenny’s closest friend being a woman who was much older than her, because that seemed absolutely right for it.” Dobbs and Soderbergh considered Susan Clark, Lauren Hutton, Sally Field, Goldie Hawn, Blair Brown, Jill Clayburgh, Susan Blakely, Linda Pearl, Brooke Adams, Mackenzie Phillips, Katharine Ross, Adrienne Barbeau, Peggy Lipton, Glynnis O’Connor, Kathleen Quinlan, Annette O’Toole and Kay Lenz before Lesley Ann Warren was cast.

The Limey was pitched to Santa Monica based film financier Artisan Entertainment in June 1998. Cameras were rolling in locations around Los Angeles by October 1998. John Hardy — collaborator with Soderbergh on six of his seven previous films — was producing with Scott Kramer. To serve as director of photography, the director tapped Ed Lachman, who’d finished shooting The Virgin Suicides for Sofia Coppola only weeks previous. As for what Soderbergh had in mind in terms of influences and intent, he revealed, “For this film especially, I’d say Petulia and Point Blank, but I love the early Alain Resnais films. Those had a huge impact on me when I saw them. Hiroshima, Mon Amour and Last Year at Marienbad are both still astonishing to me to this day. There are more ideas in the first fifteen minutes of Hiroshima, Mon Amour than in the last ten movies you’ve seen. And he was, like, the first guy to do this stuff. You look at what he was doing and it’s just jaw-dropping. I haven’t done anything nearly that adventurous yet.” He added, “I kept saying, ‘Look, if we do this right, it’s Alain Resnais makes Get Carter.”

One innovation by Soderbergh was to sneak in archive footage of his lead actor from a much older film. Lem Dobbs gave Soderbergh his bootleg copy of a 1967 crime drama starring Terrence Stamp and Carol White titled Poor Cow, Ken Loach’s debut feature film as director. Dobbs enthused, “The thing about Poor Cow is that it’s a Ken Loach film, so it had the famous Ken Loach grainy, documentary look to it, so it’s almost as if it’s not clips from another film. It’s almost as if it is memories or home movies of an actual past. It’s also the only film where Terence Stamp looks normal in. So many of the films from his heyday he has kind of strange dyed blonde hair or he’s got a period moustache or there’s something odd or it’s Modesty Blaise — it’s some wacky film. Poor Cow is the one film where Terence Stamp looks like he probably looked at that time. Like himself.” Soderbergh met Ken Loach and received the director’s blessing to poach Poor Cow, but negotiating legal clearances with two separate copyright holders stretched well into post-production.

With help from editor Sarah Flack, Soderbergh experimented with a disjointed editing style. A scene between Wilson and Elaine jumps between her apartment, a boardwalk and a diner, but unfolds as one conversation, making it unclear whose point of view we’re experiencing and how reliable it is. Soderbergh explained, “Editing is a very intensive and collaborative period. It’s where the film is finally being made, in a way. And in this case, there was a lot of experimentation. Some of our early versions went too far and resulted in something that was almost incoherent to people who had worked on the film. And we ended up backing off a little bit, and finding a better balance between the sort of abstract impressionistic side of the movie and the straightforward narrative side. That just required a bit of trial and error. That’s normal, but there was more in this film than a lot of other films I’ve made. But editing was really fun.”

One casualty in the editing of The Limey became Ann-Margret. Soderbergh explained, “She had a scene as Peter Fonda’s ex-wife when he shows up at the house in Big Sur. It was a scene that culminated in a lengthy monologue that I really liked, that I had asked Lem to write. I remember one day, I told him I had recently seen Network. And I said, ‘Gosh, you know, people used to have monologues in movies. I don’t feel like they have monologues any more.’ And Lem wrote this scene with Peter Fonda’s ex-wife doing a lengthy tirade about Peter and his lifestyle. And it all turned out very well. The problem is it had to be all or nothing. It was an eight-minute sequence. If it’s Ann-Margret, you can’t just have it be a minute. I decided, based on the rhythm of the movie and my sense that Peter’s character didn’t really need much more backstory than it had, that I just had to pull the whole thing out. That was a difficult call to make. But I felt that an eight-minute sequence right there really brought the film to a halt. And I decided to keep it going.”

Instead of screening The Limey to a test audience recruited at a mall, Soderbergh took an alternate approach. “In this case, the only screenings I had were for friends. I had called Artisan and said that in my opinion, we would be throwing our money away to do formal previews on this movie, because it’s never going to score very well. It’s the type of film that will not benefit from having these screenings. What I preferred to do was screen it for the most intelligent group of friends I could put together, and get ideas that way. They agreed. So I did just three or four screenings where I invited a different group of friends each time. It was writers, directors, actors, some other friends who are not in the film business, people who are reasonably intelligent and have a relationship with me that allows them to speak very frankly. Sometimes it would be brand new people, and sometimes it would be people who had seen it before, so I could get a balance of opinions from people who were watching the film change. I think in this case, that was a good thing to do.”

Screened at the Cannes Film Festival in May and the Toronto Film Festival in September, The Limey opened October 1999 in the United States to very favorable reviews.  Roger Ebert, The Chicago Sun Times: “Steven Soderbergh’s The Limey is the story of two older guys who hire their killers, and another who is a do-it-yourselfer. In its quiet and murderous way, it is like the delayed final act of an old movie about drugs, guns and revenge.” Charles Taylor, Salon.com: “Like Point Blank, The Limey is an art noir that courts pretension but just manages to keep from succumbing to it.” Marjorie Baumgarten, The Austin Chronicle: “Above all, Soderbergh is a master of narrative economy, stripping down images and information to their essential components, always searching for the most efficient and visually frugal means of telling his stories. The Limey continues in the vein he established with his previous film Out of Sight — straightforward genre pieces that he treats as anything but straightforward.”

The Limey was ignored in theaters, but $3.2 million at the U.S. box office did little to erase Soderbergh’s experimental streak. “I respect my audience, and I assume they come to the theater with a certain level of intelligence, but I don’t pander to them. I feel like, ‘Look, I’m going to take you somewhere, you can go or not go, but here is where we’re going’. I like that attitude when I see movies. We’re doing our thing. When we tested Out of Sight, it didn’t score very well. People wrote down, ‘I hate stories that are told this way’. There are people that just can’t stand a narrative that doesn’t go A-B-C-D. Do I think the average moviegoer today is a little less discerning than they were thirty years ago? Yeah, maybe. Back in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s in the U.S., people seemed more willing to go to a movie to have an unexpected experience. Today, people tend to want to know what they’re going to experience before they go, and they get upset if they don’t get what they wanted.” One year later, Soderbergh would win an Academy Award for Best Director with Traffic (2000), a fragmented exploration of the war on drugs that ran away with grosses of $207.5 million worldwide.

Where’d You Get All of This?
The Limey. DVD audio commentary with Steven Soderbergh & Lem Dobbs. Artisan Home Entertainment (1999)

“Independent Means: Getting Closer — With The Limey, Steven Soderbergh continues to break down the barriers between actor and director” By Jamie Painter. Back Stage West, 7 October 1999

“Soderbergh Finds Success Is No Sellout” By Rene Rodriguez. The Miami Herald, 10 October 1999

“Steven Soderbergh Interview” By Keith Phipps. The Onion

“Soderbergh Brings Past, Present Together in The Limey” By Elif Cercel. Directors World, 15 November 15, 1999

“Dan Schneider Interview 21: Lem Dobbs” By Dan Schneider. Cosmetica, 25 January 2009

Black Book (2006)
Written by Gerard Soeteman & Paul Verhoeven
Directed by Paul Verhoeven
Produced by San Fu Maltha, Jens Meurer, Teun Hilte, Jeroen Beker, Frans van Gestel, Jos van der Linden
Running time: 145 minutes

Should I Care?
At the age of 67, Paul Verhoeven got his filmmaking groove back by following the flight plan taken by so many Hollywood émigrés before him. He bought a plane ticket home — Holland, in this case — and made the Dutch/German language World War II action thriller Black Book, his first film outside the studio system in fifteen years. A similar approach worked wonders for the careers of Neil Jordan, Alfonso Cuarón and Mira Nair among others, but what Verhoeven comes back with needs almost too many qualifiers to work as a movie. “Yes, it’s got all the realism of a soap opera. No, it’s not meant to be taken as history. Yes, it’s ridiculous and laughable at times, but…” But this isn’t a very good film. A favorite among lovers of cinema and cable movie T&A alike, Black Book stubbornly refuses to take anything it pretends to be about seriously. The end product is watchable, but difficult to get hot and bothered about in any way.

To the credit of Verhoeven and his casting directors, Black Book boasts lead performances that make international stars out of Dutch actress Carice van Houten and Sebastian Koch, a German best known for his sympathetic performance in the Oscar winning The Lives of Others (2006). Van Houten & Koch spark a warm and sensual and adult dynamic that isn’t too far removed from the one shared by Jane Fonda & Donald Sutherland in Klute. They’re good enough to watch in just about anything, including a cheeseball action farce that makes The Dirty Dozen feel like a documentary. The problem with Black Book isn’t how much it resembles a comic book, but how it swerves between two completely different movies: a stylish historical drama exploring war, genocide and anti-Semitism, and a popcorn action flick with killings and boobies. Verhoeven aims for both dartboards and hits neither.

So, What’s This About?
In October 1956, a sightseeing bus reaches a kibbutz on the Dead Sea in Israel. Music draws a Dutch tourist named Ronnie (Halina Reijn) to a classroom, where she recognizes the songstress as a woman she knew during the war: Ellis de Vries (Carice van Houten). The discovery that Ellis is Jewish comes as a surprise to Ronnie and once she departs, “Ellis” — whose real name is Rachel Stein — returns in memory to occupied Holland of September 1944. Hidden from the Germans by a farmer who demands Bible study in exchange for room and board, Rachel loses her sanctuary when an American bomber dumps its ordinance on the farm. A Dutch police inspector with sympathies to the resistance tracks Rachel down and agrees to arrange passage for her across enemy lines. After visiting the family attorney (Dolf de Vries) to extract what she can in cash and jewels, Rachel is reunited with her brother, mother and father aboard a barge headed for Belgium.

Rachel’s party is intercepted by a patrol led by the Obersturmführer (Waldemar Kobus) whose stormtroopers gun down everyone on board. Rachel escapes and is spirited by the resistance into The Hague. She accepts work in a produce factory whose owner (Derek de Lint) leads a communist cell. He ultimately offers Rachel a different line of work: using her femininity to assist a valiant resistance fighter (Thom Hoffman) smuggling contraband across Holland. Evading capture aboard a train, Rachel meets Ludwig Muntze (Sebastian Koch), a handsome stamp collector who happens to command the S.S. in Holland. Making an impression on the benevolent German officer, Rachel is tasked with using any means at her disposal to gain his trust. Muntze awards her a clerical position at S.S. headquarters, where Rachel uncovers a plot between the Nazis and their collaborators to murder and rob Jewish refugees. Rachel finds herself entangled in loyalties to her country, her faith and her lover.

Who Made It?
Paul Verhoeven was born in Amsterdam one year before the outbreak of World War II. Spending a segment of his childhood in Nazi occupied Holland, he transitioned from studying mathematics and physics at the University of Leiden to the Royal Dutch Navy, where a hobby in filmmaking became his predominant interest. A career in Dutch television as creator of the swashbuckler Floris — starring Rutger Hauer — led to several acclaimed films in Holland: Soldier of Orange (1977), Spetters (1980), The Fourth Man (1983). Outgrowing his native land, Verhoeven immigrated to Los Angeles and found success juggling sex and violence with flashes of social commentary: RoboCop (1987), Basic Instinct (1992), Starship Troopers (1997). His experiences with the  special effects extravaganza Hollow Man (2000) proved a career catharsis for Verhoeven, who turned to Dutch collaborator Gerard Soeteman to draft potential projects set in historical Europe.

During the research phase of Soldier of Orange, Soeteman & Verhoeven had amassed enough material for another movie on the Dutch resistance during World War II, but it took two decades for Soeteman to realize that what the story needed to gel was a female protagonist. Titled Zwartboek (Black Book), the script was the consensus favorite among investors Verhoeven had reached out to in Europe for his next film. Securing a budget of roughly 16 million euros (21 million dollars) through a myriad of financiers in Holland, Germany, the United Kingdom and Belgium, Verhoeven collaborated with a German director of photography, Dutch art designer, British composer and actors completely unknown to most Americans. The Dutch/German language action thriller drew some of the most positive critical notices of Verhoeven’s career and was even named official entry of The Netherlands for Best Foreign Film at the 2007 Academy Awards.

How’d They Do It?
Hollow Man lifted off to the biggest box office of Paul Verhoeven’s career, but landed with a thud among critics and moviegoers alike. Waiting on Hollywood to send him material, the director lamented, “The scripts that have come to my office have all been, let’s say, pretty tame. The scripts that really interest me are a little bit edgy and have a little tension between the audience and the film itself. Those kinds of scripts have not been written much, or at least they didn’t get to me. There has been, mostly because of 9/11, an enormous amount of escapism. I mean, if you see the big successes of the last five or six years, they are all highly into fantasyland. Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Spider-Man — they’re all basically things that are not true and are not dealing with the reality of the world.” He added, “American movies in the last years have gone in the direction of non-confrontational, easy on the audience, pleasant to the audience, escapist, not confronting reality much, or not integrating reality to a strong and harsh degree, like life is.”

Screenwriter Gerard Soeteman had labored over three projects for Verhoeven to direct and each was set in the Old World. An adaptation of Boris Akunin’s bestselling 19^th century detective novel The Winter Queen was at the top of the list, while a return to the grounds Soeteman & Verhoeven had sowed in Soldier of Orange was stuck in neutral. The director recalled, “That material was already there in 1978 and we thought it was great, but it showed more the shadows than the light. We could not solve the script immediately. It took us twenty years to solve it! Soldier of Orange brought us this material, and we couldn’t use it.” He added, “We put the material aside and thought about it for twenty years. And then we changed protagonists. The original protagonist of the movie was the young boy in the sailboat. It’s a very small part now, but it was the main part. We could never figure out how he would be able to infiltrate the German headquarters. Whatever we came up with, it seemed contrived. When Gerard changed it around, well, she uses her sexuality to get inside.”

Verhoeven elaborated on the collaboration. “Gerard sets out the structure and the general drift. He monitors story development and character development. He writes the first draft and the next drafts. I then add things and change things, scenes as well as characters. If my memory serves, I came up with Ronnie, as I did with Maja in Spetters. The scenes at the end in the prison camp are mostly mine. I have made a significant contribution to the script. For most films I made with Gerard, the script was mostly his so I didn’t get a credit. But this time my contribution was such that Gerard and I both felt that we should share the writing credits.” He added, “Gerard and I have always clicked. We are from a similar background, even though our characters are very different. Gerard is only two years older than me. We were both children in the war, we went to grammar school, studied at Leiden University, and both did our national service. And then we met on the TV series Floris. With such similar backgrounds it’s easier to work together than when you are from different worlds.”

By Verhoeven’s estimation, between 700 and 800 documents were referenced to form the basis of the script, notably a report by a member of the Dutch Nazi Party named H.W. van der Vaart Smit, who was imprisoned after the war. “We have weaved some of those stories into Black Book. This is what makes the film so provocative, because nobody has yet shown how we treated our prisoners in 1945. But that wasn’t our only source of inspiration for the film. Picture archives were another. For instance pictures of the camp guards. Members of the provisional army and resistance people. After all, after the war everybody claimed to have been in the resistance. There were lots of dubious people there. If you look at those pictures, you wouldn’t have wanted to be at their mercy. They way they strut when they had arrested a Dutch Nazi, makes you fear the worst.” Rachel Stein was modeled after three Dutch women who lived under Nazi occupation: resistance fighters Esmée van Eeghen and Kitty van der Have and singer Dora Paulsen.

With a script for Black Book in hand by the end of 2003, Verhoeven reached out to Jos van der Linden, production manager on Spetters. Van der Linden introduced the director to San Fu Maltha, former head of acquisitions for Polygram International who’d launched Fu Works, an Amsterdam based production company. Verhoeven enthused, “San Fu felt right immediately; because of his collaboration with Jos, because he’s increasingly putting himself on the map as a producer, and because he’s got this international air about him. He’s got lots of contacts abroad, and that was important for this film. After all, Black Book is a big international production. And I my intuition didn’t lie, because San Fu has made some excellent financial deals.” By the closing of the 2005 Cannes Film Festival, Verhoeven’s next film was lined up with Maltha and producers Jens Meurer (for Berlin based Egoli Tossell), Teun Hilte (London based Clockwork Pictures) and Jeroen Beker & Frans van Gestel (Amsterdam based Motel Films). German private media fund VIP Mediafonds came on board as majority financier.

Verhoeven mused, “Financially, a disaster, getting money from all these different sources, about fifteen, and with the distribution deals, then you have thirty deals or something like that. But it’s a co-production with Germany, England, Holland, and Belgium, and all the post-production had to be done in England. In Babelsburg, we used all the interiors there, and there was a lot of extra German funding because there were three very important German parts. Then, of course, we had the Dutch funds, television funds, and then there is this European fund, situated in Strasbourg, I think, so to keep that money going parallel to how much money you’ve spent is — well, it’s not parallel at all. So from that point of view, the United States is ten times easier. Certainly if you work for a studio, that’s not a concern in any way. Artistically, of course, it was paradise, because nobody told me ‘This is too violent or too sexy, too many breasts, too much this, too much that, morally too ambiguous.’ Or ‘That’s not possible — a Jewish girl and a Nazi officer — it’s morally unacceptable,’ et cetera. None of that. We had the script, and the producers said, ‘Good, let’s shoot this.’”

When it came to casting, Verhoeven found himself out of sorts on native soil. “I had lived for twenty years in the United States so when I came back to Holland I had to catch up a little bit on the Dutch film industry. I used some of the actors I worked with before I came to America like Derek de Lint and Thom Hoffman. But the movie was mostly about younger people. I had seen a movie called Minoes where Carice played a cat. So I must say that I dismissed her immediately, but my casting director felt that that was probably not representative of her and brought her in on the first day of the auditions. Even though we did auditions for two months after that it was clear that on the day we met her that she was right for the part. She is phenomenal. She’s a real big talent. She does all her own singing. Often I was forced to back off as director and say to her, ‘Forget my instructions. Do what you want.’ She is probably the most talented actor that I’ve ever worked with.” For Black Book, Verhoeven reunited with his Dutch casting director Hans Kemna.

Filming was underway in The Hague, Netherlands by August 2005, with director of photography Karl Walter Lindenlaub lighting sets designed by Wilbert Van Dorp. Verhoeven explained, “I was never sure that I would shoot the next week because the money would not come in. You’re working with a crew that has not been paid for months and they do it because they like that I did this movie and that it was a big movie and a European movie so they stayed. Otherwise they would have left. Now that is not a pleasant feeling, to work with a crew that is partially not paid, and to go do it. So I felt that was a bit nightmarish and I feel it’s the case with every independent movie, and there are many of them that you start and they fall apart.” After wrapping interior scenes at Studio Babelsburg in December 2005, Verhoeven lobbied producers for a prologue in Israel.  “I tried to convince them that it was absolutely necessary that this way: Israel at the beginning and the end what happened to her. How did she evaluate the situation with the Dutch? And of course, she evaluated it by turning her back on Holland and going to Israel.”

Screened at the Venice Film Festival and Toronto Film Festival in September 2006, Black Book opened later that month in The Netherlands. Arriving April 2007 in the United States, critics seemed shocked how much they enjoyed it. Manohla Dargis, The New York Times: “Mr. Verhoeven’s cartoon realism, accentuated by the sitcom lighting, the primitively staged gun battles, the gnashing teeth, whizzing bullets and thundering score, has its hard-surface appeal. Designed for distraction (the frequently timed gunfights suggest as much), Black Book works only if you take it for the pulpiest of fiction, not a historical gloss, its stated claims to ‘true events’ notwithstanding.” Marrit Ingman, The Austin Chronicle: “The action set-pieces, double crosses, and narrow escapes are handsomely mounted and suspenseful as a Saturday matinee. In the production notes, Verhoeven cites David Lean as an influence, and the film has Lean’s epic scope and crackerjack timing, if not his mannerly refinement.” Andrew O’Hehir, Salon.com: “It’s a messy, colorful big-screen entertainment that veers from sober period piece to outrageous melodrama, which is to say it’s a Verhoeven movie.”

Rounding up $4.3 million in the United States, Black Book sold $22.3 million in tickets overseas. Hailed as a comeback for Verhoeven, Black Book was submitted by The Netherlands to vie for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. The director reported, “The reviews in Europe have been very positive in general. Well, except in Holland. Many reviews in Holland were negative. It’s been the biggest R-rated hit there in twenty-five years, the audience has embraced it. The last one that was that successful was my own movie, Spetters. But the critics have been very tough. Some of them feel I have been Americanized, and I think it’s true that I have used my American experience to create a more driving narrative. Which is often absent in European films, even the greatest ones. In La Dolce Vita, a classic of European filmmaking, the story is nearly zero. There is no compelling narrative. Working in the American film industry has made me want to make movies with compelling, driving narratives. But Holland has always been, well, like it says in the New Testament, no prophet is honored in his own country.”

Where’d You Get All of This?
“A Conversation With Director Paul Verhoeven” By Bill Hunt. The Digital Bits, 29 December 2000

“Verhoeven’s Black Book Cranks Up In The Hague” By Robbert Blokland. ScreenDaily.com, 29 August 2005

Black Book — Production Notes

“Director Paul Verhoeven Discusses Black Book” By Rebecca Murray. About.com, 31 March 2007

“Paul Verhoeven” By Scott Tobias. The A.V. Club, 3 April 2007

“Paul Verhoeven Gets Real”By Andrew O’Hehir. Salon.com, 6 April 2007

“Verhoeven’s Dutch Comeback” By Karl Rozemeyer. Premiere Magazine, April 2007

“Back To Basics: Talking to Paul Verhoeven” By Damon Smith. Bright Lights Film Journal, August 2007

“Paul Verhoeven Interview” By Daniel Robert Epstein. UGO.com