De Palma a la Mod

'PASSION' MIGHT PLAY VENICE FEST

Mon, 28 May 2012 21:58:52 -0600

DE PALMA, MALICK, ANDERSON AMONG DIRECTORS MENTIONED BY NEW ARTISTIC DIRECTOR
The Hollywood Reporter's Eric J. Lyman reports today that Alberto Barbera, the newly installed artistic director of the Venice Film Festival, talked to Italian reporters over the weekend about possible directors who may be bringing their new films to the festival this year. Among those he mentioned were Brian De Palma, Terrence Malick and Paul Thomas Anderson. De Palma's two most recent films, Redacted and The Black Dahlia, each had their premieres at the Venice Film Festival. De Palma received the director's prize (the Silver Lion) for Redacted at the fest in 2007. This year's festival runs August 29-Sept. 8, which means there is a possibility Passion may have its premiere a mere three months from now.

DE PALMA ATTENDS 'PROMETHEUS' SCREENING IN PARIS

Mon, 28 May 2012 12:23:39 -0600

RAPACE GETTING POSITIVE REMARKS IN EARLY REVIEWS
A press screening for Ridley Scott's Prometheus was held in Paris Monday, and according to a couple of Twitter postings, Brian De Palma was in attendance. Christopher Ramoné tweeted that De Palma was there with Paris Match film critic Christine Haas. Journalist Bertrand Rocher tweeted that he was seated beside De Palma at the screening. The screening full of French critics surely provided De Palma an early sense of how Noomi Rapace will be talked about as Prometheus makes its way around the world. While early reviews from critics at the screening seem to be mixed about Prometheus, there seems to be a consensus that Rapace is very good in the film. Ecranlarge's Simon Riaux gives the film four out of five stars, and says that "Michael Fassbender quickly steals the show from the impeccable Noomi Rapace." Riaux later states in the review that while both Rapace and Fassbender are "brilliant," the rest of the cast are stuck in mechanical roles. A negative review from CloneWeb's Marc complains about cardboard characters at the script level, but says that Rapace "comes out honorably." Another blog review from a disappointed Céline at Just Cinema mentions that Rapace and Fassbender are, again, the best of the cast.

RAPACE INTERVIEWED ON SET OF 'PASSION'

Sat, 26 May 2012 08:39:33 -0600

SCENE WITH PAUL ANDERSON: SHE SPEAKS TO MASK OF RACHEL MCADAMS
Noomi Rapace is the cover story of this Sunday's New York Times Magazine, in anticipation of the release of the upcoming Ridley Scott film Prometheus. For the article inside, Karen Olsson visited Rapace in Berlin while the actress was filming Passion, and the article ends with some very intriguing happenings on the set of the film, where Rapace was working on a post-sex scene with Paul Anderson. Here are the Passion-related excerpts:

When I met Rapace in Berlin this spring, the 32-year-old actress was filming “Passion” with the director Brian De Palma, and her focus on the tasks at hand seemed to distract her from the approach of the tidal wave that is “Prometheus,” a big summer movie directed by Ridley Scott and starring Rapace. The film, Scott and 20th Century Fox insist, is not so much a prequel to Scott’s 1979 landmark film “Alien” as it is one that “shares DNA” with “Alien” — make what you will of that distinction. Regardless, Rapace’s Elizabeth Shaw, as the lead of an “Alien”-type film, will assume the place of Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley. The significance, on-screen and off, is slowly sinking in for her. “Some people in London came up to me on the street and said: ‘You’re Noomi Rapace? Oh, my God, you’re the new Ripley, is it true?’ ” she says. “I started to realize this can actually be quite big in a way that I hadn’t really expected.”
During my visit to Berlin, the weather was improbably balmy, and a youngish, well-turned-out set found its way to the rooftop pool and bar at the Soho House Berlin, a hotel and club in a restored Bauhaus building that at one time was the headquarters of the Hitler Youth and before that a Jewish-owned department store. There among the sunbathers, paddling around the small pool, was a cheerful, toothy boy wearing a mask and a snorkel: this was Rapace’s son, Lev, age 8. In February he came with his mother to Berlin, where he attended a Swedish school. He would spend the latter part of the spring in Turkey to be with his father, Noomi’s ex-husband, Ola Rapace. (An actor himself, Ola had gone to Turkey to play a villain in the next James Bond movie, “Skyfall.”) Noomi joined Lev in the water for a while, and later she warned him not to splash too much, for the sake of the people in the poolside loungers, though privately she grumbled that people who can’t abide a splash or two shouldn’t sit next to the pool.

YOUNG RAPACE WAS BEWITCHED BY VIOLENT HOLLYWOOD MOVIES
She was a restless, willful girl — “I was always running and climbing and building things” — and her parents, fearing she wouldn’t be well served by the local public school in Iceland, moved back to Sweden, to a small town in the south. At 11, she started taking judo lessons, and for a while she was devoted to that sport. She was also bewitched by Hollywood movies with violence in them — “True Romance,” “Thelma and Louise,” “Alien,” “The Terminator,” “Scarface,” “Rambo” — as well as “La Femme Nikita” and kung fu movies...

RAPACE PREPARED FOR 'CONTROL FREAK' ISABELLE BY DOING BIKRAM YOGA
In anticipation of each part she plays, Rapace chooses a training regimen (or, sometimes, a lack thereof) not simply to get in shape but to adjust her relationship with her body. To become Lisbeth Salander, she Thai-boxed and kickboxed, because she wanted to awaken her fighting spirit. Before appearing in “Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows,” Rapace’s first Hollywood movie, she stayed away from the gym, which she said would have been wrong for her Victorian-era-gypsy role, but she studied with a gypsy-dance expert. And for “Passion,” the film she came to Berlin to do, she decided on Bikram yoga, because she felt that its regimented sequence of poses would appeal to her character, Isabelle — “a control freak,” she called her.

RAPACE IS VERY FILMMAKER-DRIVEN IN CHOOSING HER ROLES
Regarding her future projects, “she’s very filmmaker-driven,” [Rapace's manager Shelley] Browning says. “And she laments the same thing that all female actresses lament, that there are rarely great roles for women.” Rapace is at low risk for being typecast, because she conforms to no recognizable type. Her face is arresting, with large, alert eyes and cheekbones that seem poised to burst, “Alien”-style, out from beneath her pale skin. She won’t show up in a romantic comedy any time soon, Browning says — “I just don’t know that she responds to those kinds of characters” — but she is not ruling anything out. After I spoke with her in Berlin, Rapace was reunited with [Niels Arden] Oplev, the director of the first “Millennium” movie, to shoot a thriller in Philadelphia co-starring Colin Farrell, in which she portrays a woman who was disfigured in an accident. She also plans to play opposite her ex-husband in a biopic directed by Catherine Hardwicke, about the romance between the boxer Bo Hogberg and the singer Anita Lindblom.

ON THE SET OF 'PASSION', GOING OVER LINE READINGS WITH DE PALMA & PAUL ANDERSON
On my last morning in Berlin, I accompanied Rapace to the “Passion” set, inside an apartment building in a fashionable neighborhood. The set itself was a Euro-creepy bedroom, with scaly black curtains, a round, black bed in the middle, a stuffed bird on a dresser and an open bathroom. Because of the room’s small size, most of the crew huddled in the hall, while De Palma and the cinematographer José Luis Alcaine sat in chairs in the back of the room, near the camera and monitor. It was a post-sex scene that Rapace was performing, with the actor Paul Anderson, and after she changed into her costume — a man’s dress shirt — and her hair and makeup were adjusted to look tousled and slightly sweat-dampened, they read through the dialogue.

In the film, based on a French thriller, Rapace’s Isabelle suffers at the hands of Christine, her manipulative boss, played by Rachel McAdams, then seeks revenge. During this scene, Isabelle, who has just slept with Christine’s lover (played by Anderson) at his apartment, discovers a trove of sex toys. These include a ghostly mask of Christine herself, with white skin and long blond hair, which Isabelle holds up to the light and then addresses.
During the read-through, Rapace questioned De Palma about a couple of lines in which Isabelle talks to the mask, suggesting they weren’t consistent with how she played an earlier scene. She substituted another line, mimicking something Christine has already said: “I used to want to be admired, now I want to be loved.”
As they started filming, Rapace adjusted her performance slightly with each take — more smiling in one, more solemn in the next. And when it came time to shoot her close-up, Rapace and De Palma started analyzing the line again. “Maybe I should just do it more simply,” she said. It was a strange declaration — “I used to want to be admired, now I want to be loved” — to hear Rapace-as-Isabelle make, over and over, after having listened to Rapace-as-Rapace tell me how much she hoped not to fall prey to those desires. She went on to try a few different phrasings, cooing each one to the mask of Rachel McAdams, and finally pared it down to this: “I wanted to be admired, but now I want to be loved.”

'PASSION' SALES ROUNDUP AT CANNES MARKET

Fri, 25 May 2012 20:01:16 -0600

WILD BUNCH SOLD ALMOST ALL OF ITS PORTION OF TERRITORIES
The image at left shows the partial cover of last week's Variety, Cannes Market edition, featuring a full-page paid advertisement for Brian De Palma's Passion. This copy is currently for sale on Ebay. Variety reported today that, according to Wild Bunch's Vincent Maraval, aside from a pending U.K. deal, the company has sold all of its portion of the Passion territories. These include Scandinavia (sold to Scanbox), Russia (to Top Film), and Brazil (to Playarte). Screen Daily reported earlier this week that Wild Bunch had sold Passion to Gussi for Mexico. Wild Bunch is splitting sales on the De Palma film with SBS Productions, which is headed by Passion producer Said Ben Said. SBS already sold theatrical and DVD/VOD rights for Germany and Switzerland to Ascot Elite at last February's Berlin fest market. Also at the Berlin market, SBS sold Benelux (Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg) to Lumiere, and France to ARP Sélection. SBS is also selling rights for the U.S., Spain and Italy.

Mon, 21 May 2012 18:33:11 -0600

'GREETINGS' MENTIONED IN KAEL, EBERT BIOS

Sun, 20 May 2012 19:18:12 -0600

RUTANYA ALDA: "BRIAN WOULD SAY, 'I'VE ONLY GOT THREE MINUTES OF FILM'"

Rutanya Alda is briefly quoted about working on Brian De Palma's Greetings in Brian Kellow's Pauline Kael: A Life In The Dark, his recent biography of the influential film critic. In the following paragraph from page 119 of Kellow's book, one senses the origins of De Palma's "No Net Productions"...

Although Pauline definitely had her favorites among directors, her New Yorker reviews were, from the beginning, full of surprising reactions. She went out of her way to praise a movie that few saw, Greetings, directed by a twenty-eight-year-old filmmaker named Brian De Palma. Greetings wasn't in the macabre vein of the later films that made De Palma famous but was an off-kilter comedy about three young New Yorkers trying to keep from being drafted, and it had been shot in two weeks for very little money. Rutanya Alda, who played a supporting role in the film, recalled how the tiny budget made it essential to work fast and accurately: "Brian would say, 'I've got only three minutes of film-- we've got to get the scene in three minutes.'" Locations were snapped up wherever they could arrange them cheaply: one sequence in a bookstore was shot at three in the morning without the owner knowing about it. Pauline acknowledged that some of Greetings was a mess, but she also recognized a vibrant, original talent; Greetings went on to win the Silver Bear Award at the Berlin International Film Festival, and Pauline noted De Palma as a talent to watch.

44 years later, De Palma is hoping his latest film, Passion, will be accepted for the Berlin fest next February. Nancy Allen is also quoted in Kellow's book, in regards to Kael's enthusiastic response to De Palma's Carrie...If her elevation of De Palma's "persistent adolescent kinkiness" into some kind of major achievement baffled many of Pauline's friends as well as her enemies, it was her review, in the end, that carried the day for De Palma and his cast. Nancy Allen, who played the movie's chief villainess, remebered vividly the day that Pauline's review appeared. "I think that Brian was just thrilled," she said. "And disgusted at the same time, because the studio wasn't treating it like it was anything better than a slasher picture." De Palma quickly became one of the directors Pauline felt compelled to promote. Allen remembered that she had the reputation for being a bit chilly toward her pet directors' wives and girlfriends, but she found Pauline warm and friendly. "She liked Brian a lot and there I was, the girlfriend. I didn't know if I would be accepted or not. She was very pleasant and said hello and smiled sweetly. I remember thinking, Okay, that was all right. She was possessive. They were her guys."

EBERT BOOK DELVES INTO SOHO LOFT WHERE 'GREETINGS' & 'WOODSTOCK' WERE EDITED
Kael and Greetings are both mentioned within a chapter on Martin Scorsese in Roger Ebert's recent memoir, Life Itself. In this excerpt, Ebert recalls meeting Scorsese for the first time:

That first time we met in New York, he took me to visit his job, as an assistant director and editor on Michael Wadleigh's Woodstock. The footage from Woodstock was being edited by a team headed by Thelma Schoonmaker, later to become the editor of Scorsese's features, and Walter Murch, a tall young man with a mustache who would later reinvent the strategy of sound design. In a top-floor loft in Soho, reached by a freight elevator, a headquarters had been cobbled together with a skylight and a lot of little rooms off the big one. "You know what picture was cut in this loft?" Scorsese asked me. "They made Greetings in this loft." That was the De Palma movie with Robert De Niro in his first role. So much was still ahead. The loft was a crazy, jumbled place, with earnest young editors bending over their Kellers. "The Keller Editing Machine," I was told. "The finest editing machine in the world, and the only one you can use to cut three-screen footage with eight-track synch sound, with thirty-five-millimeter and sixteen-millimeter film on the same machine at the same time."

A couple of paragraphs later, Ebert recalls going out to dinner with Scorsese, Kael, De Palma, De Niro, and Paul Schrader...

Marty mailed me screenplays titled Jerusalem, Jerusalem and Season Of The Witch, which was later to become Mean Streets. One night during the New York Film Festival he and I and Pauline Kael ended up in my hotel room, drinking and talking, and his passion was equaled by hers. Pauline became urgent in her support of those filmmakers she believed deserved it. She sensed something in Scorsese. Her review in the New Yorker of Mean Streets would put him once and for all on the map.

Her connections were crucial. One night we met in the lobby of the Algonquin and went out to eat with Brian De Palma, Robert De Niro, and Paul Schrader. De Palma and De Niro had made two low-budget films. Did Marty, De Palma, De Niro, and Schrader know one another at that time? Certainly. Did anyone guess Raging Bull would result? Pauline must have sensed the mixture was volatile. We went to an Italian restaurant. Pauline was then between her jobs at McCall's and the New Yorker; De Niro and De Palma were unemployed; and Schrader was a hopeful screenwriter. Thinking I was the only person at the table with a paycheck, I picked up the tab. "You dummy," Pauline told me. "Paul just sold The Yakuza for $450,000." She always knew about the deals.

RAPACE LISTENED TO LOTS OF WAGNER

Sun, 20 May 2012 15:10:32 -0600

AS SHE SUBMERGED HERSELF INTO HER 'PASSION' CHARACTER

Above is an Instagram picture, posted by Hein van Joolen, of a banner for Passion at the Cannes Film Festival. Van Joolen, a sales manager from Amsterdam, states in the photo's caption that he saw the first footage of Passion this week, and that the film will be released this winter. (Thanks to Lindsey for the translation!) Meanwhile, Noomi Rapace Online has posted scans from the June issue of the U.K. magazine Dazed & Confused, which features Rapace on the cover. Near the end of the article, Rapace is interviewed by phone from Berlin, where she was, at the time, working on Passion. Here is that excerpt from the article by Hannah Lack:

As the clock ticks towards the release of Prometheus, forgetting Rapace won’t be easy—she’s following up Ridley Scott by working with another film titan, Scarface director Brian De Palma. A few weeks after we meet, Rapace calls from an apartment in Berlin where she has set up temporary home while shooting De Palma’s new feature Passion, a remake of 2010 French cat-and-mouse psychodrama Crime d’amour. Her accent has taken on an American twang, and she’s submerged in a new character, tinkering with whatever volatile spirits will bring it to life. Today, this involves listening to a lot of Wagner. “I don’t usually do interviews while I’m shooting,” she pauses. "At the moment I’m so deep in it, it’s hard for me to step out. When I was doing the Millennium movies I’d drink coffee in a corner, while everyone else was talking and laughing. I was angry and isolated, but when I look back I see, of course, it was Lisbeth—she was in charge, leading the way. But with this movie, it feels like we’re becoming some kind of disturbed, dysfunctional family!” A car is on its way to escort her to the set—they’ve been wrapping at three or four a.m., but she’ll be up to take her son to school in the morning. Meanwhile, there are new scripts on the table, awaiting her consideration. Rapace has decided that whatever character she invites into her life next, it will not be a ditsy, Jennifer Aniston-style rom-com heroine. “A character who’s happy and doing a bit of yoga and going on a date? That’s not for me. I think life is both darkness and light, almost like a battlefield with those two forces. I’ve always been drawn to… not darkness, but things with an edge,” she says. “When I’m working, I don’t care if I look ugly or fat, skinny or shave my head… I took a decision early on that I refuse to be driven by my vanity.” She thinks for a second before adding: “Perfection is boring.” And with that, Noomi Rapace—former punk, new action hero—sums up why she’s the perfect antidote to every vanilla starlet on our screens.

'PASSION' TEASER TO BE SHOWN AT CANNES

Mon, 14 May 2012 23:29:20 -0600

AS NEW IMAGES HIT THE FILM'S FACEBOOK PAGE

According to the Facebook page for Brian De Palma's Passion, Wild Bunch plans to show a teaser for the film at its offices in Cannes during the film festival. The offices are located at 4 la Croisette. But the real exciting part of the new Facebook page is the set of six pictures posted yesterday, including the one above and the several below. These images are tantalizing, and anticipation for this film is only just ramping up...

'PASSION' POSTER GOES TO MARKET AT CANNES

Mon, 14 May 2012 16:55:12 -0600

AND RAINER BOCK ADDED TO CAST CREDITS AT IMDB

The above poster is being used to represent Brian De Palma's Passion for SBS Productions and Wild Bunch Distribution at the Film Market of the Cannes Film Festival, which opens on Wednesday. Meanwhile, the IMDB has added Rainer Bock to its Passion cast credits, where he is listed as "Inspector Bach." Bock, pictured here, is a veteran German actor of the stage, TV, and film. He has appeared in Steven Spielberg's War Horse, Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds, and Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon. In 2008, Bock appeared in Caroline Link's A Year Ago In Winter, which featured Passion's Karoline Herfurth in a starring role.

Also of note is a post from Jeffrey Wells at Hollywood Elsewhere, who visited Studio Babelsberg on Friday, one week after the Passion crew likely cleared out of there. Wells' post includes a couple of interesting videos he took while being given a tour of the studio. In one video, the tour guide, Eike Wolf (Studio Babelsberg's head of corporate communication), shows Wells where parts of Cloud Atlas were recently filmed, and in another, they walk through a room full of props, including a copy of the British prime minister's book from Roman Polanski's The Ghost Writer.

'PASSION' SET PIC WITH DE PALMA & RAPACE

Wed, 9 May 2012 21:11:10 -0600

This picture is tiny, but it shows Brian De Palma and Noomi Rapace rehearsing a circular dolly-track at Gendarmenmarkt while shooting Passion. The film was shot in Berlin between March and May.