Catherine Breillat, the provocative French director of such sexually graphic films as Romance, Sex Is Comedy, À Ma Soeur! and Anatomy of Hell, is planning to make her next film, The Old Mistress, on location in Ireland.
"It's a slight departure from Catherine's more recent films," says Hamish McAl- pine, owner of Tartan Films, which is producing the film. "Catherine has written the script, which is closer to Les Liaisons Dangereuses, and she really wants to shoot it in Ireland. She says she can't find the landscape she wants in France. We're working now on setting it up."
So, will this be the first Breillat film with a 15 cert? "Well, I don't know," McAlpine says. "The script looks fine, but Catherine can make some changes or may add some unscripted action."
Day-Lewis: cheap is good
Daniel Day-Lewis describes his new film, The Ballad of Jack and Rose, which was written and directed by his wife, Rebecca Miller, as the most modestly budgeted picture of his career since My Left Foot, which earned him an Oscar in 1989. "I was spoiled on that film," he told the New York Times this week, "and now I'm spoiled again. It's extraordinary to work in a very small group of people with a common will - and without all that grotesque paraphernalia of film-making surrounding you."
The slammer for Sizemore
Character actor Tom Sizemore has been sentenced to 21 months in jail on a probation violation arising from his conviction for beating his former partner, Heidi Fleiss. He remains free on $25,000 bail pending the outcome of his appeal in the Fleiss case, but he was ordered by a second judge to enrol in a court-approved drug rehabilitation programme.
In court last weekend, Sizemore tearfully pleaded with the judge for leniency, but his mood was different on the way out as he made derisive remarks about the assistant district attorney who prosecuted the case: "He's a chump, he's a C student, he's a piece of garbage." Sizemore's many violent credits include True Romance, Natural Born Killers, Heat, Saving Private Ryan and Black Hawk Down.
Schrader gets the demons out
Paul Schrader was in defiant mood when his movie, Exorcist: The Prequel, finally had its world premiere at the recent Brussels Fantastic Film Festival. He attacked the production company, Morgan Creek, which shelved his footage and hired Renny Harlin to shoot a replacement version, for trying so hard to suppress his work.
"I always knew there would be blood on the floor but I didn't know it would be mine," Schrader said. "If you have made a film which has been shelved or discarded, nobody - not your wife or best friend - will ever believe it is any good because they [Hollywood studios] don't discard $35 million investments."
He said that he and William Peter Blatty, who wrote the original novel of The Exorcist, watched the Harlin version together. "What I was most worried about was that it was going to be sort of good," Schrader said. "If it was good, my case was doomed. The worse it got, the better I felt."
London shutdown
Production on The Man from London, by Béla Tarr, the Hungarian director of Werckmeister Harmonies, has been shut down in Corsica after just three weeks of shooting. A Georges Simenon adaptation, the $5 million film featured Janos Derzsi, Volker Spengler and Tilda Swinton. According to Agence France Presse, it had already fallen 10 days behind schedule when the plug was pulled.
The Man from London was to have been co-produced by Humbert Balsan's Ognon Pictures, but Balsan's recent suicide prohibited the other co-producers from "agreeing to continue to finance the film," said executive producer Jean-Patrick Constantini. Oddly enough, given that the film is most unlikely ever to be finished, it already has a running time of two hours, according to imbd.com.
