The Star Online: Entertainment: Movies
The Star Online: Entertainment: Movies |
- Voices uncovered
- 'The Great Gatsby' to open Cannes film fest, Amitabh Bachchan to attend
- Matthew McConaughey stays true to acting
| Posted: 13 Mar 2013 03:24 AM PDT Get inside the world of emergency call operation centres and the people who handle them. The calm voice on the other end of an emergency call is someone who's only heard, but never seen. Even in most American crime drama series that utilise a 911 call made to operators as a plot point, only the voice can be heard. Writer Richard D'Ovidio became intrigued by these faceless but reliable people manning the telephones after his wife heard a news programme about 911 call centres on the radio. After doing research at a call centre in Los Angeles, D'Ovidio sat down to write the script for The Call. A thriller, The Call sees Halle Berry as a 911 operator who gets involved in trying to crack a kidnapping case after the victim (played by Abigail Breslin) calls for help from the trunk of a car. Jordan (Berry) recruits her cop boyfriend (Morris Chestnut) to help her. In the production notes, D'Ovidio shared what happened when he sat in at the call centre in Los Angeles: "Every time a call came in, my stomach would drop, but they were so calm! I didn't know what to expect next, and they were just pros. I found that they were the glue of the city. They held the police, the fire, the ambulances – nobody moved in the city without them." After getting the role, Berry went to 911 centres as well to observe them in real life. She ended up being there for hours, listening to real life calls. During her time there, she found out that there is an intense training programme the operators have to go through and 80% of the trainees do not graduate. She said: "You have to be very intelligent, you have to be able to type at a record speed and you have to be able to spell because you have to type in names of random streets. If someone calls you for help and tell you where they are you don't have time to ask: 'Honey how do you spell that?' You have to type it out and then this gets translated to the police or the fire department or the ambulance. "So you have to be able to spell, think on your feet and talk to the person on the phone and instruct them to do what you want them to do, then put them on hold and inform all these other people. So the person who can do that and stay calm and always be thinking is a different kind of bird, that's a different kind of individual." Creating the suspenseful world of The Call is director Brad Anderson (The Machinist), who got the novelty of the idea when he read the script. It also happens that the director has always been fascinated with 911 calls. He said: "We hear the calls but never really know what goes into the call. We only get bits and pieces. This film will answer a lot of those questions." He added, expanding on the suspense element in the film: "Most of the story takes place in the course of one day, a couple of hours. It's almost a real-time type scenario and it's very contained, literally contained. I mean, much of the action occurs at the call centre, and in the trunk of a car. I was sort of interested in the idea of how to tell a story, dramatically and visually and cinematically, in such a small space. It posed a lot of challenges, but that was part of the draw for me, as well." The Call opens in cinemas nationwide tomorrow. |
| 'The Great Gatsby' to open Cannes film fest, Amitabh Bachchan to attend Posted: 12 Mar 2013 09:56 PM PDT LONDON (Reuters) - Australian director Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby will open the 2013 Cannes film festival, the world's most important cinema showcase, organisers said on Tuesday. The adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's account of 'Roaring Twenties' America combines serious literary heritage and A-list star power, with Leonardo DiCaprio in the lead role. DiCaprio will make an appearance at the festival on the famous Croisette waterfront for the first time since 2007. The opening gala, preceded by a glitzy red carpet fashion parade and followed by parties along the palm-lined Riviera, will also be attended by Bollywood star Amitabh Bachchan and U.S. rapper Jay-Z. "It is a great honour for all those who have worked on The Great Gatsby to open the Cannes film festival," Luhrmann, whose first film Strictly Ballroom was screened there 21 years ago, said in a statement. "F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote some of the most poignant and beautiful passages of his extraordinary novel just a short distance away at a villa outside St. Raphael," he added. DiCaprio plays Jay Gatsby in the 3D movie, Carey Mulligan is Daisy Buchanan and Tobey Maguire is Nick Carraway, the narrator. The festival runs from 15 to 26 May and U.S. director Steven Spielberg is head of this year's jury. Last year's winner of the coveted Palme d'Or for best picture was Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke for the drama Amour. |
| Matthew McConaughey stays true to acting Posted: 11 Mar 2013 11:24 PM PDT AUSTIN, Texas (AFP) - With his Hollywood career in high gear and his new film Mud out soon in US theaters, Matthew McConaughey said he feels no pressing need to put acting aside for a turn behind the cameras. Speaking at the South by Southwest (SXSW) festival Sunday, McConaughey -- a native Texan who graduated from college in Austin and now resides here -- said he has a couple of ideas in the back of his head that he'd like to personally direct. One is a children's tale he thought up before having three children of his own; the other is what he called "a Spanking The Monkey slash black comedy" based on the year he spent as an exchange student in Australia. "But, to be honest, I really enjoy being An. Actor. For. Hire," the 43-year-old thespian said, emphasizing those four words in his thick Texas drawl. "I've just shut down my production company, shut down my music company, and I said I've got three things that I want on my desk on the proverbial Monday morning: that's my family, my (charitable) foundation and acting. "And that has filled my days where I am able to give enough time to each of those, to really nurture all of them... They're the three things that, when the phone rings or that email comes in, I want to look at." Directed by Jeff Nichols and filmed in rural Arkansas, Mud stars McConaughey as the title character, a rough-hewn fugitive who strikes a deal with two boys to help him evade bounty hunters and reunite with his love. The coming-of-age story, which also stars Reese Witherspoon, screened in competition at the Cannes film festival in 2012 before going on to Sundance this year and, on Sunday, the indie-angled SXSW event. "There was an innocence (to Nichols' script) and I think it comes across in the film," said McConaughey when film critic Scott Foundas of New York's Village Voice weekly asked what drew him to the project. "It was Southern in the right way. It had a very defined sense of place and time and space... I'd never heard a voice like this from a character like Mud. I immediately was attracted to the dreamer aspect -- he's such a wonderful dreamer -- and the aristocracy of this guy's heart." The son a kindergarten teacher -- she was in the front row at Sunday's talk -- and a now-deceased gas station owner, McConaughey recalled how he decided to drop out of law school up the street at the University of Texas to study film. His father's advice at the time, he said, was simple: "Don't half-ass it." He also spoke of the making of the male stripper movie Magic Mike, saying had sent Steven Soderbergh "an eight-page email" discussing the ways he thought he should play his character, an empire-building Florida strip club boss. The director's one-word reply: "Sure." With comedies like The Wedding Planner and action flicks like Sahara under his belt, McConaughey said he has two markedly different projects now in post-production and expected in theaters later this year. One, The Wolf Of Wall Street, directed by Martin Scorsese, a hero to McConaughey in his film-school days, sheds a spotlight on fraud and organized crime in the New York financial district. The other, Dallas Buyers Club, finds the actor in his home state playing a drug-taking womanizing business executive in the 1980s who imports unapproved drugs for HIV-AIDS victims after he learns that he too has the virus. McConaughey, proclaimed "the sexiest man alive" by People magazine in 2005, lost nearly 20 kilograms to get into his gaunt mustachioed character. |
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