Newsgroup: it.arti.cinema
Titolo: Michael Clayton (tutto in una riga)

Tilda Swinton č la vera chiave di lettura di un film molto bello.

Tilda Swinton è la vera chiave di lettura di un film molto bello.
E ora in più righe.
Togli i "buoni" e il manicheismo a Insider, o a Erin Brockovich.
Metti il "cattivo" in condizioni "umane". Esisterà pure al mondo un
pezzo di merda che al cesso piange, ma al cinema non lo vediamo
spesso.
E qui: Michael Clayton? Un pezzo di merda. Marty? Un pezzo di merda.
Arthur? Un pezzo di merda. Il personaggio della Swinton di cui non
ricordo il nome? Pezzo di merda.
Non c'è scioglimento liberatorio, non trionfano i buoni.
I buoni, le vittime, in questo film sono relegate a pochi minuti di
proiezione.
Un film ben scritto e ben recitato, essenziale, non "hollywoodiano".
Tilda Swinton è una roba pazèsca!

 Tilda Swinton è una roba pazèsca!
A me e' parso un film *molto* hollywoodiano, ma non intendendolo come un
insulto: scritto benissimo, girato benissimo. Personaggi definiti in
base a quello che dicono e fanno, non da dialoghi esplicativi. Mi e'
piaciuto molto lo scambio telefonico fra Marty (Pollack) e la
giornalista nella scena di apertura: due battute che disegnano un
personaggio forte, con due dita di pelo sullo stomaco, col culo al caldo
di un forte senso di autorita' come quasi sempre Pollack quando fa
l'attore (anche nell'ultimo Kubrick). E la Swinton e' da-vero una roba
pazesca. Da rivedere in versione originale, ora che so che cosa succede
e non rischio di perdermi nei dialoghi.
-- 
UFV:Michael Clayton/La notte(DVD)/Cemento armato/The Moon is
Blue(DVD)/Meet John Doe(DVD) - 
http://www.albertofarina.tk

 pazesca.
Completamente d'accordo. Qualcuno sul blog di John August ha definito
la sceneggiatura "Writing by numbers" ma fatto fa uno bravo. Sono
rispettati tutti i principi della sceneggiatura classica, ma con
classe. Un po' come Il Verdetto, spesso citato come esempio dalla
manualistica per scrittori di cinema.
Qui una discreta intervista con Girloy in cui parla dei riferimenti
visivi e tematici del film.
http://www.ugo.com/ugo/html/article/?id=17925&sectionId=7

 
http://www.ugo.com/ugo/html/article/?id=17925&sectionId=7
Niente male, grazie. Tristanzuolo che il trascrittore, mentre riporta la
nostalgia per il cinema non scemo degli anni Sessanta-Settanta, non
sappia nemmeno scrivere il titolo del cuculo di Forman senza toppare la
grafia inventando un improbabile "Cuckoo's Next".
La riporto tutta, dai.
Tony Gilroy Interview - Michael Clayton
By Brian Tallerico
Tony Gilroy may be making his directorial debut with Michael Clayton,
one of the best films of the year, but unless you've been living under a
rock you've probably seen his work before. Gilroy wrote all three Bourne
movies, Proof of Life, Devil's Advocate, and Dolores Claiborne. He's one
of the hottest writers in Hollywood and is about to be one of the
hottest directors as Michael Clayton, starring George Clooney, Tom
Wilkinson, Tilda Swinton, and Sydney Pollack, opens wide this weekend.
Audiences in major cities have already had a chance to see the film and
it's doing incredibly well in limited release and has received
near-universal praise. As the film gets set to take the rest of the
country by storm, Tony Gilroy sat down with us to talk about why it took
so long to direct his first film, the current state of moviemaking in
Hollywood, and even some of his experience on the Bourne films.
UGO: Clearly, with your track record, you could have had the opportunity
to direct long before Michael Clayton. So, why this film? What took so
long?
TONY GILROY: I waited because I was...it's complicated. Part of me was
really into the idea of being an A-list screenwriter and sort of owning
that. There's some pride in that. My life was really good. I was raising
a family. And working with Taylor Hackford [his director on Dolores
Claiborne, The Devil's Advocate, and Proof of Life], the collaboration
was so good and I was so deeply involved that it sort of released the
pressure from the rest of the experiences and frustrations along the
way. I thought I had the best of both worlds for a long time - I could
be on set, be in the cutting room, be involved in casting, but I still
wasn't having to get up at 4:30 in the morning and if I needed to be
home, I could be home. I could work on another job while we were
shooting.
About ten years ago, I went "I can't do this any more, I got to do [my
own thing]." Absent of the experiences with Taylor, it's been every
gradient all the way to some films that I've worked on that I haven't
even seen because I was so pissed off. It's every variety of experience.
But it gets frustrating. You finally just want to get one right or
really know what went wrong.
UGO: So, is it, from now on, "Written and directed by Tony Gilroy"?
TONY: Yeah. It's hard to imagine that I would...I mean, I definitely
want to do it again. I've already got something almost ready to go.
UGO: Could you see yourself going back to letting someone else direct
your material?
TONY: Maybe. I finished a script last year and I'm not sure if I want to
do it or not. Maybe I would let it go. The one thing I can't see is
directing someone else's script. I don't know about that. We finished
this so long ago. Since we finished I did a studio job rewrite, I did a
production job for a director, and I finished something for myself.
There's an economic aspect of it too. Look, it would have been much
easier to get $80 million to do an action picture, as weird as that is.
It would have been easier to go into a meeting and I could have been
directing a movie a lot earlier if I had gone in and said "Give me $80
million, I want to do an action picture." This is a harder road.
UGO: Can you speak a little about that road and how you got the
financing?
TONY: When I wrote it, I knew from the moment I set it up that it would
have one of the sketchiest pitches - one of the elements of the picture
is "It will be a 'movie star movie.' The way to get it made is to get a
movie star to come in and wave his fee." That was the formula - write a
part that's so juicy that someone comes in and says, "I'm gonna do one
for free." It's a hard movie to greenlight at $50 million. The P&A on
this movie will be way more than the movie ever cost. It's a very
inexpensive film.
UGO: A lot of the scripts you've written seem to be about men whose
careers have taken an amazing toll on their lives - Michael Clayton,
Jason Bourne, Proof of Life, The Devil's Advocate. We make this choice
to do THIS, to be a lawyer or a spy, and we face the consequence of
those choices. Is that something that you've noticed before and have you
considered why that interests you?
TONY: I didn't notice until about five weeks ago when we got to Venice
[Film Festival] and started talking about all this stuff, to be honest.
I don't really think about and I don't really look at stuff that way. I
do think that. I think also that I'm afraid of what's inside that guy -
that's the unifying DNA of all those characters - the thing they need to
be afraid of is just what's inside them. They're their own worst enemy.
Devil's Advocate is really biological and operatic. In Bourne, as much
as he needs to be afraid of everyone else, his real problem's himself
and what he's capable of and what he's done. And Michael Clayton that's
true of every character in the film. I'm also really into people who are
really good at something. In Devil's Advocate, he's never lost a case.
Bourne is the BEST at what he does. Michael Clayton is the best fixer.
So, you're taking that and saying "That's not enough."
UGO: Much has been made about the '70s inspiration of the film. What
were the films that inspired it the most? There's been comparisons to
The Conversation, Klute...
TONY: Klute visually. It would be a great double bill at some point. We
really, really looked at that. Point Blank was a huge visual influence.
We looked at all these movies that were useless to us that we thought
were going to be valuable - Wall Street and all these other New York
City movies - and one day [Cinematographer] Robert [Elswit] put in Point
Blank, which has no relation to the rest of this movie at all, but the
way Point Blank is shot? Robert and I watched it and said "This is so
formal and so framed. It's so wide and anamorphic and allows the actors
to move through the frame." We actually had one of the lenses that was
built for Boorman for Point Blank. We had this whole Smithsonian
collection of panoramic lenses that Robert gave us. The movies that are
in your head, story-wise, all of the Pakula films, Hal Ashby - just that
sort of attitude.
UGO: Do you think it's something that's missing from today?
TONY: Totally. Today, you have two different cultures. You have this
independent culture that's sort of been ghettoized off on the side, this
sort of Sundance culture, which is dealing with interesting material but
you have people with no money who are doing things for the first time
with actors who suck because they can't get the good actors. Every now
and then, something really great comes out of it or something inspired.
Then you have this 'country club' on the other side of the street where
everybody who knows what they're doing is working on sh*t. This is a
huge generalization, but what was so great about the '70s was that you
had all this muscular filmmaking and people who were really on top of
their game all working on the same material. So you get Five Easy
Pieces, which would now be like some really, ordinary Sundance film. It
wouldn't have Jack Nicholson. It wouldn't have that cast. Imagine
Cuckoo's Next. Last Detail. You can keep going. You had all this mix of
professionalism and muscle and material.
UGO: It seems to me that George is fighting against that divide with his
career choices - Good German, Good Night and Good Luck, Syriana, this
film. But he's one of the few.
TONY: Totally. Solaris! I love Solaris. And how much money do you need,
you know?
UGO: What attracted you to the Bourne concept in the first place?
TONY: It was a host body. It was a very low radar flick. It wasn't a big
deal. It came on very incrementally - take six weeks and tear this story
apart. I had been trying for a long time with different projects to sort
of re-downsize action pictures. I wanted to take it down and make it
intimate, make it character. It had gotten to the point where everything
had gotten so frickin' loud that it couldn't get any louder. I'm not
gonna fight that. There's got to be another way. When we did Proof of
Life that was the real proving ground for me. That final sequence in
Proof of Life is something I'm really proud of. It's a really great
action sequence and something that I've heard is used by the military in
training. And that taught me that if you really care about what's going
on and you really know where you are geographically, you can do a whole
movie that way. All of a sudden there was this 'empty car.' And I just
started taking it in that direction, moving it away from spectacularity.
It really can just be a guy watching a gunshot go off and watching a
bunch of birds fly up. It's more exciting if it's small.
UGO: Did you have all three movies mapped out at all in your mind?
TONY: Oh God no. No one EVER thought there'd be a sequel. When that
first movie was a hit and they came back and said we might want to be a
sequel, I got the DVD out and started thinking "Is there any possible
way that Clive Owen could have crawled out of that field? Is Chris
Cooper really dead?" We NEVER would have killed Chris Cooper and Clive
Owen if we thought there was going to be a sequel. No one was more
stunned than the people who were involved in making the movie.
UGO: Would you make a fourth one?
TONY: I don't think so. I don't think so. I don't think that would be a
good idea. I'm sure GE will want to do that. They only need one person.
They only need Matt.
-- 
UFV:Quei temerari sulle macchine volanti(DVD)/Anatomy of a 
Murder/Michael Clayton - 
http://www.albertofarina.tk