 |
June 2 - June 9, 2002 |
Norwegian thriller recast in Alaska
Christopher Nolan's latest picture Insomnia defies moviemaking film noir convention
By Angela Baldassarre
Originally Published: 2002-05-26
 |
|
Director Christopher Nolan on the set of Insomnia
|
Displaying classic British good looks, London-born Christopher Nolan could easily have starred in all three of his exceptional feature films. Instead this remarkably intelligent 32-year-old filmmaker prefers to stay behind the cameras and weave his own inverted conventions of film noir... much to our delight. Nolan's first feature, 1998's Following, centred on a blocked writer who spent his days stalking strangers in hopes of jump-starting his imagination; and 2001's Memento moved backwards in uncovering the true events surrounding a man (Guy Pearce) with no short-term memory.
And now there's Insomnia, where Nolan directs Hillary Seitz's adaptation of the 1997 Norwegian thriller. This time the director is following sleepless homicide detective Will Dormer (Al Pacino) and a young cop (Hilary Swank) as they track a murderer (Robin Williams) in Alaska. When Will makes a fatal mistake, he soon finds himself blackmailed by the very man he's trying to catch.
Tandem talked to Christopher Nolan when he was in Toronto recently.
Why Americanize Insomnia?
"I saw the original film in 1997. Somebody gave me a tape of it and I saw it twice in one sitting. I absolutely loved it. I felt it was unimprovable and it did what it wanted to do very, very well. But at the same I thought it had a really interesting set of situations that could be 'Americanized' and cast in a different idiom, much more the mould of the kind of studio cop movie, the kind of morality tale that 50 years ago the studios were good at making. I felt that if you applied that set of events to that type of storytelling, have a sympathetic protagonist that leads you into the story, you'd get a very different type of film that would be pretty interesting. So I found out about the remake rights and turned out that Warner Bros. had them and the producers had commissioned a script. That was before I made Memento. So I made Memento but I kept my eye on it. When it was finished, I read what Hillary Seitz had done and she actually had done a couple of things that I really wanted to do in terms of changing the story to make it more that kind of tale. So I got involved at that point."
Page 1/...Page 2
|
| Home / Back to Top |
|
|
 |
|
|
</ td>
