Me han puesto los dientes largos, nunca mejor dicho, los próximos estrenos ;-)
Only The Lovers Left Alive
Dir: Jim Jarmusch
"La
segunda de la jornada fue Only lovers left alive, en la que Jim
Jarmusch recupera el pulso completamente perdido en Los límites del
control. En esta ocasión cuenta la relación entre dos vampiros, pareja
desde hace siglos: Adam (Tom Hiddleston, que últimamente parece estar en
todos los sitios), músico y científico, vive en Detroit, como si fuera
una estrella de rock decadente y lánguida, solo interesado en comprar
instrumentos musicales excepcionales y preocupado con el devenir de la
raza humana. Eve (Tilda Swinton, quién si no) vive en Tánger, cuidando a
otro vampiro anciano (John Hurt), Christopher Marlowe, el escritor que
dice la leyenda redactó las obras de Shakespeare. Eve viaja a Detroit a
sacar de la depresión a Adam, y allí se cruza con su revoltosa hermana
pequeña, Ava, que perturba toda la paz."
http://cultura.elpais.com/cultura/2013/05/25/actualidad/1369491722_299864.html
Pinchar aquí para descargar el kit de prensa de Only Lovers Left Alive del Festival de Cannes
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Byzantium
Dir: Neil Jordan
Byzantium marks return to vampire genre for director Jordan
Neil Jordan is laid up. A traffic accident in Dublin in April has left
him with an injured leg, and he is conducting interviews for his new
film, Byzantium, from a sofa at Fitzpatrick’s Hotel in Dalkey.
Home is nearby, on the prestigious Sorrento Terrace. He also has a house
outside Castletownbere, on the Beara peninsula in West Cork, where he
filmed Ondine in 2009, and where he also shot the wilderness scenes in
Byzantium, which is set in the English seaside town of Hastings.
Byzantium is Jordan’s second vampire movie, after Interview With The
Vampire, in 1994, and it is only the third of his 18 films that he has
not also scripted (Interview was written by Anne Rice, and The Brave
One, in 2007, is the work of Roderick Taylor, Bruce A Taylor and Cynthia
Mort).
Byzantium was written by the British playwright, Moira Buffini, and is
based on her 2011 National Theatre play, A Vampire Story.
Jordan was sent the script by his producer, Stephen Woolley. “I didn’t
expect to read anything like that, it was really exciting,” he says.
“There were so many elements in it that were similar to other work I’d
done; there was storytelling, and references to fairytales. It was a bit
like Company of Wolves, a bit like Interview With The Vampire, a bit
like The Miracle.
“There was a certain theatricality in Moira’s first draft of the
screenplay. Initially, it was as if, perhaps, the characters were
vampires, or they might have been psycho-killers, it wasn’t really
resolved. I told Moira, ‘don’t be afraid of making it into a vampire
film. Don’t be afraid of making it frightening. Don’t be afraid of the
genre, in other words’.”
Byzantium stars Gemma Arterton and Saoirse Ronan as mother and daughter,
Clara and Eleanor, who pass themselves off as sisters, and who, it soon
transpires, have been vampires for the past 200 years. Clara is a
stripper and prostitute, ruthless in protecting herself and her
daughter, while Eleanor is a sensitive soul, stuck at the age of 16, who
only kills those who are already dying.
Arterton is “morbidly sexy,” as one character remarks — as Clara. “When
I met Gemma in Berlin, she had already read the script, and loved it,
so we agreed at once to work together,” says Jordan.
Ronan, with her red hair and pallid complexion, was, says Jordan, “the
perfect and obvious choice for the role of Eleanor. Saoirse had already
done such amazing work, in films like Atonement. The only thought I had
about the casting was that I had done Interview With The Vampire with
Kirsten Dunst, when she was very young. I wondered if there might be a
part for her in Byzantium. But when I met Saoirse, I knew she was the
one for the role.”
Jordan has updated the conventions of the vampire genre. “It was time
to reinvent the legend,” he says. “The whole genre had got a bit tired:
this whole thing with the teeth, and of not seeing yourself in mirrors,
and not walking around in daylight.” In Byzantium, the vampires move by
day and night, and kill with their thumbnails.
Byzantium also differs in tone from Interview With The Vampire. It is
more of a European arthouse film than an American horror, and its
elegiac mood is underpinned by its haunting soundtrack, composed by
Javier Navarrete. “Javier also did the music for Pan’s Labyrinth. The
only source music he had to use for Byzantium was Beethoven’s ‘Third
Piano Sonata’. That sonata is all over the score he wrote; Javier
rearranged the notes in different ways. It’s wonderfully simple,
really.”
Byzantium has been acclaimed as a “neo-feminist” film, which makes
Jordan smile. “Cool, I wouldn’t mind being part of that club,” he says.
“You can call this a feminist vampire movie, if you like, but that is a
bit reductive.
“Moira’s writing was obviously female, but it was also bloody, and it
was also sexual, and it was also very direct. If it is feminism, then
it’s a very different version of what we know from the ’60s or ’70s.
It’s a lot more knowing, for a start, and it deals more with issues of
female sexuality.”
Given its intelligence and complexity, Byzantium is far more likely to
win critical kudos than match the commercial success of Interview With
The Vampire. That film, starring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt as poster boys
for the paranormal, had distinctly homo-erotic overtones: Cruise camped
it up as the amoral Lestat, while Pitt walked wall-eyed in his wake as
the reluctant accomplice, Louis. Arterton and Ronan, by contrast, bring
depth and focus to what are far more evolved roles, and Byzantium,
unlike so much in the horror genre, is genuinely spooky.
The action switches back and forth between the drab, grey present and
the grimy England of the early 19th century, where violence against
women, and the sexual exploitation of the young, is very much the norm.
The first male character in Byzantium to be initiated into the
‘brotherhood’ of vampires is the soldier, Darvell, played by Sam Riley,
who, after becoming ill on an expedition to Ireland, is confronted by
two strangers while researching a cure among ancient documents in the
Long Room, the old library in Trinity College Dublin.
They direct him to a mysterious island, where he is assaulted by a demon — his doppelganger — and reborn as one of the undead.
The link with Trinity is no coincidence. The college is the alma mater
of Bram Stoker, and the roots of Jordan’s interest in vampirism can be
traced to his familiarity with the Dracula author’s home in Dublin.
“I grew up in Clontarf,” he says. “I used to cycle past Stoker’s house
to get to the Fairview Cinema. If I saw a vampire movie, I saw it there.
The house was abandoned, it was almost in ruins at the time, and it
used…” He smiles at the memory. “It used to terrify the life out of me.”
Neil Jordan at home and abroad
Neil Jordan was born in Co Sligo in 1950, and grew up in Dublin. He
studied English and Irish History at UCD, and first found notice as a
creative writer. His collection of short stories, Night in Tunisia,
published in 1976, won the Guardian Fiction Prize. The title story was
adapted for television, directed by Pat O’Connor, in ’82. By then,
Jordan had published his first novel, The Past; a second, The Dream of a
Beast, followed in ’83.
The veteran director, John Boorman, soon took Jordan under his wing,
hiring him as a script consultant on his film, Excalibur, which he made
with a largely Irish cast in Co Wicklow. Boorman produced Jordan’s debut
feature film, Angel, in ’82. Angel starred Stephen Rea as a showband
musician who witnesses a murder.
Jordan then made The Company of Wolves, which was based on an Angela
Carter story, which was itself inspired by the legend of Little Red
Riding Hood. His next project was Mona Lisa, a respectable crime
thriller, set in London, that starred Bob Hoskins as an ex-con who
becomes obsessed with a prostitute. Other films followed: High Spirits,
We’re No Angels and The Miracle all met with mixed success.
Jordan’s ’92 film The Crying Game, was the first to win him
international acclaim. It starred Rea as an IRA terrorist on the run in
London, who becomes involved with a young transgender woman, played by
Jaye Davidson. The film won Jordan an Academy Award for Best Original
Screenplay.
To coincide with the release of Byzantium, the Irish Film Institute in
Dublin is currently screening a retrospective of all 18 of Jordan’s
films. Jordan will not be attending, due to his injured knee. Are there
any he would not want to watch again. “Not really,” he says. “They all
came out of the same person. I have no favourites.”
The most controversial of Jordan’s films, and the one that took longest
to bring to fruition, was Michael Collins, his ’82 biopic of the War of
Independence hero.
“Michael Collins was a strange thing. Warner gave us the money to do
this piece of Irish history, but they would not have done that if
Interview With The Vampire had not been such a success.”
Republican violence was still a thorny and divisive subject in the
Ireland of the ’80s. “There was a strange parallel between attempts to
decommission the IRA, the past generation and the more recent. I said,
this film will be about violence, and how difficult it is to cease that
activity once you’ve begun it.”
Another Jordan project that spent years in development was The Borgias,
which he originally wrote as a screenplay for film but eventually
adapted as a lengthy television drama. “Dreamworks suggested I do the
series. It’s like a 30- or 40-hour movie. I had done the research years
ago, so it gave me a chance to expand on that.”
Jordan has continued to write fiction: his most recent novel was
Mistaken in 2011. “I’ll write another book, I think,” he says.
Right now, he says, “I need to get back to writing directly for the
screen. I want to get out of Ireland for a while, the reality here is a
little bit depressing at the moment.” His next film project is a ghost
story, which he will film in America. Would he like to move there for a
time? “I wouldn’t mind at all. If I can walk. And if they’ll have me.”
Mark O' Sullivan
Irish Examiner
24 de mayo de 2013
***