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No Country for Old Men (Nov. 9)
Josh Brolin desperately wanted to audition for the
part of Llewelyn Moss, the fortune-finding hunter at
the center of this Coen Brothers’ adaptation of the
Cormac McCarthy best seller. Unfortunately, Brolin
was on location filming Grindhouse, so he decided to
send in an audition tape. The brief scenes were directed
by Quentin Tarantino and shot by Robert Rodriguez.
The response from the laconic Coen brothers? “They
wanted to know who lit it,” Brolin says. “They weren’t
interested in me. I was the last person they interviewed.
Fortunately, we hit it off.”
Lions for Lambs (Nov. 9) Derek Luke
prefers acting in realistic settings, but he may have
had a change of heart after this Robert Redford politi
<cal thriller. Luke plays a soldier in Afghanistan,
and although the filming took place in California,
Luke’s part required him to spend time lodged
waist-deep in snow. “The schedule called for this scene
to be shot in three days, but it took three and a half
weeks,” he says. “They’d pack me in the snow and then
start doing everything they had to do with the cam
eras and lights. I was freezing. And Redford he’s so
smooth, so calm. He’d stroll up and give me some notes,
and inside I’d be screaming, ‘Will you please hurry
up?’ The lesson is, be careful what you wish for.”
Southland Tales (Nov. 9) Director Richard
Kelly knew he would draw a crowd by shooting scenes
for this wild political satire on the beaches of Southern
California. He didn’t, however, expect a
horde of resourceful paparazzi to show
up. “We were doing a scene with Justin
Timberlake on the Santa Monica pier,”
Kelly recalls, “and the paparazzi jammed
the Ferris wheel. Every time it turned, a
new group would pop up from their car
and start snapping photos.”
P 2 (Nov. 9) Sometimes the stories
that give us the biggest nightmares come
from the news. Producer Alexandre Aja
came up with the idea for this dark
thriller, where a woman (Rachel Nichols)
is trapped with a creep (Wes Bentley) in
an underground parking garage, after
reading about a series of attacks on Pari
sian women walking to their cars. The
difference is, the bad guy in this movie has prepared
a dinner for his victim.
Mr. Magoriiun’s Wonder Empo
rium (NOV. 16) For this Dustin Hoffman comic
fantasy about a magical toy shop located in a major
city, production designer Therese DePrez had a mere
few weeks to fill up a huge 7,000-square-foot space
with 10,000 toys! To find them all, DePrez and direc
tor Zach Helm scoured rare toy shows all over the a
world. They ended up with playthings from 12 Jk
different countries.
Love in the Time of Chol
era (NOV. 16) The setting of Gabriel
Garcia Marquez’s romantic novel is Colom
bia, but the filmmakers, concerned about
security in this country
with a reputation for vio
lence, were set to shoot it
in Brazil until the Colom
bian vice president inter
vened and guaranteed
their safety. “We could al
ways tell the threat level
by the quality of the troops
with us,” director Mike
Newell says. “If the threat
was low, we were accom
panied by the city police,
who weren’t even armed.
Something ominous got us
marines. When the pro
duction traveled, the sol-
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/V diers sat in the back of their trucks and played
" » cards, but then there were points when they’d
face the countryside, and you knew they were on the
lookout for something.”
The Mist (Nov. 21 ) Working with an abbreviated
schedule, director Frank Darabont adopted a “more
energetic” style, requiring some resourcefulness from
his crew. “In the scene where there’s an earthquake,
we didn’t have time to build a set, so the actors were
prepared to scream and fall down. We didn’t
tell them our sound guy found a recording
of an actual earthquake, which we ran
i through a couple woofers. The sound was
I enormous, and I tell you, the shock on
I the actors' faces was real.”
Fin Not There (Nov. 21) in Todd
Haynes’ experimental biopic, six actors por
tray Bob Dylan at various stages in his life.
< “Actors, like most creative people, love
having materials to work with, and with
Dylan there’s so much amazing stuff”
Haynes says. To help the cast prepare, he
made mix-tape CDs with Dylan songs for
each time period (Christian Bale, for exam
ple, listened to rock protest songs such as
Mowin' in the Wind) and large books of
images from the folk hero’s surroundings.
“I didn’t just want an impersonation of
Dylan,” Haynes says. “I was looking for the
more subtle, internal cues of what made him
unique at each stage.”
Continued on next page
USA WEEKEND • Oct. 26-28,2007
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