Robert Bresson: Genesis

Michael Ciment: A Man Escaped, with its stubborn protagonist, is like a new Robinson Crusoe. In his cell, he tackles a series of technical problems, like how to saw through the bars on his window. He does not indulge in metaphysical despair. He seeks the will to live within himself.

RB: You'll find much of the same in Genesis, pre-production for which will begin in a few months' time. Adam is like a shipwrecked sailor setting off to discover an unknown island. The beauty of Genesis is God asking Adam to name things and animals. I find that magnificent. And when he reaches this unknown island, everything is ready and waiting. I am reconsidering this project, which I gave up fifteen years ago. It will take at least one year to prepare. There is the question of getting birds, insects, big animals, a tree. There is the question when to set it. It is unending. The screenplay is progressing well, but it is still incomplete. It is a gigantic task. I am like someone from Marseilles: tired out before I begin.

MC Where does Genesis end?

RB: Either at the Flood or the Tower of Babel and the invention of language. It will be a long film, for television and spoken in Ancient Hebrew, which is a beautiful language, with bits of Aramaic. Adam cannot speak in French or English, he must speak in a language almost no one can understand.

MC: Will it be even more "musical" than your other films?

RB: Absolutely. Imagine all the animal sounds, not just at the Creation, but in the ark, during the Flood. A concert performance! The emotion. Silence, too, sometimes. I want to do it so badly. I'll rush at it the way one rushes into the ocean. We'll see what happens.

MC: Where will you shoot it?

RB: I don't know yet. Neither in Palestine nor in any other Middle Eastern country. I don't want stylized landscapes and anyway they've never mattered to me much. I'd rather see a camel on top of the Puy-de-Dome [an extinct volcano in central France] than on a sand dune. I'd like to shoot in the Auvergne, which is where I was born,
because the landscape is so varied.

Quelle

Hawks; John Ford: April Morn

There was a round-the-world oil exploration story that was a late
project of Howard Hawks. He also wanted to do a Vietnam film, which he
described in terms that made it sound a bit like "Bringing Up Baby" --
men in an environment they didn't understand. Ford of course had a
Revolutionary War film, "April Morn," which sounded like it could have
been tremendous.

Quelle

Joel & Ethan Coen: To the White Sea

Based on a slim novel by poet James Dickey, TO THE WHITE SEA started as an adaptation by David and Janet Peoples (12 MONKEYS), and that draft was pretty goddamn good in its own right. When the Coens got involved as director/producer, though, they rewrote it, and they came up with something great and terrifying, a script that represented the biggest challenge of their careers. Universal put the film in turnaround, and the Coens rode it over to Warner Bros., where they worked to get it up and running with a $75 million pricetag and Brad Pitt as their star.
What happened next may well be the moment that Coen fans look back on in the future as the end of all good things. In rapid succession, TO THE WHITE SEA got axed, the Coens lost their mother, and the attacks of 9/11 drove them out of New York, where they had just relocated.

Aint it Cool News

Babak Payami (kein Titel)

Then during the post-production work on my next film Secret Ballot (2001) in italy I put together enough resources to initiate a project based on my story of an Afghani labourer deported from Iran who seeks to find and kill Osama Bin Laden in order to win himself a home. The story was loosely mldelled on Conrad's Heart of Darkness with some original twists. I was supposed to visit the Afghanistan/Pakistan border area in late October 2001 to organise the production, but then September 2001 happened and everything fell apart. I felt then that I would be riding on sensationalism whereas before 9/11 the hunt for Bin Laden and what happened to Afghanistan were concepts not many people cared about.

In: Sight and Sound. Juni 2004