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August 8 - August 15,2004 |
Finding some value in Nothing
Italian-Canadian wunderkind filmmaker Vincenzo Natali unleashes another quirky movie
By Angela Baldassarre
Originally Published: 2004-07-25
In 1997 one of the strangest Canadian movies to be made debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival. Titled Cube, the Kafkaesque drama about six characters who wake up one morning to find themselves thrown into a strange maze made up of identical, symmetrical cube-like rooms, the film was the brainchild of Toronto wiz-kid Vincenzo Natali, and became a cult video hit around the world (especially Italy).
Seven years later, and Natali is back with an even more imaginative and offbeat picture, Nothing. The movie centres on Dave (David Hewlett) and Andrew (Andrew Miller), lifelong friends with diverse personalities who can't live without each other. But one day, as terrible circumstances begin to surround them, they magically manage to "wish" everything away... everything. Now the two are left alone in the universe with absolute nothing.
Tandem talked to Vincenzo Natali from his home in Los Angeles about Nothing.
I read in the press notes that you were intrigued by the concept of nothingness. Can you explain that?
"Sounds like an oxymoron, doesn't it? I think I'm interested in a lot of things that are abstract. In my films I like to take a story that is in many respects very conventional and then juxtapose it against an abstract setting. So in Cube it was really a prison-escape story set in a geometrical world. And in Nothing it's really a buddy comedy but in a completely blank universe. I just find that those two things, the kind of dynamic between combining those two things, can be really interesting."
How did you sell this?
"Well I'm not sure that the people who bought it quite understood what we were selling. But I think they had a lot of faith in me and the people that I work with and really to their credit, they gave us complete creative control. And that was the only way to make this movie because we make, I think, in a hopefully exciting way, a lot of unconventional choices. And truly this film is an independent movie. Most of the money came from Japan and Germany, with some help from Telefilm. But honestly, I'm amazed that somebody let us do it. Honestly, living in such a conservative time, it's so hard to get a movie financed. And if you were to spend any time in the world film market, to find out and see what kind of material is made, it's very hard to do original material. So I think we were extraordinarily lucky to do the film we did and to make it with the kind of controls that we had."
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