|
Jagger leads old school
filmmakers in Sundance debut
The Sundance Film Festival may be a mecca for
young, independent filmmakers, but this year a
couple of old school directors and pop culture
icons led by 57-year-old rocker Mick Jagger have
come here with their own movies that couldn’t
find Hollywood funding.
Jagger was promoting a Second World War spy thriller,
Enigma that he co-produced with Lorne Michaels,
creator of television’s Saturday Night Live.
The British film is directed by Michael Apted,
whose credits date from the 1960s up to the 1999
James Bond movie, The World is Not Enough.
They are joined by writer-director David Seltzer,
a Hollywood veteran perhaps best known for The
Omen in 1976 but whose work also includes 1971’s
Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory. Seltzer
is debuting his drama, Nobody’s Baby.
And while young filmmakers and actors like John
Cameron Mitchell of rock opera Hedwig & the
Angry Inch, or Eric Bana in Australian drama Chopper,
may be getting a lot of buzz in this mountain
town east of Salt Lake City, it was Jagger who
drew frenzied crowds to the Enigma premiere.
Enigma tells the story of British mathematicians
housed at Bletchley Park, north of London, who
were responsible for decoding messages sent from
German headquarters to bases around the world
and U-boats hunting merchant ships in the world’s
oceans. Enigma was the name of the machine used
by Germans.
It weaves a tale of espionage into a romance between
the lead mathematician, played by Dougray Scott
and a Bletchley clerk, played by Kate Winslet,
as the group races against a four-day clock to
crack the German code and save a U.S. convoy of
ships from being torpedoed on a voyage across
the icy Atlantic.
For filmmakers just starting out, it may seem
unbelievable that Enigma, backed by the likes
of Jagger and Michaels and starring Winslet, Scott
and Jeremy Northam, could be considered in the
vein of independent movies most of which are made
on a shoe-string budget.
“It doesn’t have a distributor, it’s
not from a big studio. It’s made with independent
money and in England” Jagger said in a staunch
defense of its roots.
Michaels and Apted defended the ‘indie’
label, too, for reasons that included their desire
to control production and maintain a distance
from Hollywood studios who might change the ending
or put an American star among the British cast
to pump up its box office power.
More
Stories...
The
human face of Kennedy in Thirteen Days
Spiderman
look out!
Stage
company launched by McGregor aand Law
Briefly...
|
