The Hong Kong director Wong Kar-Wei is known for keeping Cannes waiting, and
it’s a mark of the festival’s faith and respect for him that, after his last
film, 2046, arrived a day late in 2004, he’s been trusted with
delivering his new film My Blueberry Nights for the prestigious
opening slot.
However, one of the main players in this highly anticipated three-in-one road
movie – Wong’s English-language debut – won’t be making the trip up the red
carpet, even though her one and only visit was in 1996 with a small part in
Bernardo Bertolucci’s Stealing Beauty. Instead Rachel Weisz
will be hard at work in Serbia, on the final leg of an epic shoot that has
taken her round Eastern Europe and seen her getting drunk on gin on Marshal
Tito’s Blue Train, dancing the bolero on the deck of a 1920s yacht at 4am
and frightening the tourists with what can only be described as a bizarre
hissy fit-cum-tantrum on the historic Charles Bridge in Prague.
Dressed in a black-and-white op-art dress with a giant ruff, wearing witchy
Victorian boots that look like Doc Martens from Salem, Weisz is preoccupied
when we meet. We’re in a Belgrade side street, which is today doubling for
St Petersburg, roughly midway through shooting on The Brothers Bloom,
the second film by the young West-Coast director Rian Johnson.
Johnson’s last film was a stylised, syncopated film noir, complete with a
tough-talking gumshoe and a duplic-itous dame. If it sounds familiar,
though, it wasn’t: though it covered every angle in the hard-boiled fiction
handbook, Johnson’s debut, Brick, was set in a small-town high
school, with jive-talking teenagers taking on the search for the killers of
a missing student.
In Johnson’s latest Weisz plays Penelope, a rich American woman targeted by a
pair of scheming brothers – Stephen (Mark Ruffalo) and Bloom (Adrien Brody)
– who take her on a tour of the world in an attempt to relieve her of $1.75
million. It’s another genre movie, the kind most famously essayed by Robert
Redford and Paul Newman in The Sting, but, as with Brick,
inside there lies a film with a more complex agenda.
“I don’t know if anyone else would agree with me,” Weisz says between takes,
“but what was fascinating about Brick was that it was this
collision of genres: it was film noir set in high school, so those
characters shouldn’t have been talking the way they did – but they were, and
that was what was so genius about it. The Brothers Bloom is a conman
movie, so it’s another genre that already exists, but for me – and it may
just be my solipsistic point of view – I feel as if my character shouldn’t
really be in a conman movie at all. Penelope is very uncool. She’s a geek in
a conman movie.”
She laughs. “I don’t know, maybe that’s happened before, but to me it
certainly seems unusual.”
What’s more unusual is Weisz’s commitment to the part. Last year the
36-year-old collected her first Oscar, for The Constant Gardener, yet
here she is in a rundown part of town with her 11-month-old baby Henry near
by.
And not only did she pursue the part quite aggressively, she attached her name
to the script right from the start, bringing along her fellow Academy Award
winner Brody and this year’s Oscar nominee Rinko Kikuchi, the sulky deaf
schoolgirl from Babel almost unrecognisable here as the brothers’
beautiful, enigmatic sidekick Bang-Bang.
So what attracted her? “The character,” she says simply. “The story’s a great,
great story. It’s a great yarn, very original and very unusual, it’s not
like anything I’ve ever read before, but more than that it’s a fantastic
female role. It’s hard to put Penelope in a box. She’s an heiress who’s
never been out, so she’s not really an adult. Or rather she’s not an adult
woman. She’s lived in a big house all her life, doing lots of hobbies, so
she’s got many, many, many skills. She speaks lots of languages, she
juggles, she raps, she skateboards . . .” She grins. “I don’t know how much
I’m allowed to give away. But she’s got very varied hobbies, some more
street-wise, even though she’s never been out. Never been kissed, I suppose.
“So I’m the mark in their con,” she continues, “but I don’t know that. Even if
I did know, I wouldn’t care, and the idea for Stephen is that they’re going
to give me the time of my life.
“It’s all about the deliciousness of the con – the more elaborate, the more
fantastical the fiction, the more pleasure they get. They’re storytellers,
that’s basically what they are, and Stephen is the chief storyteller. His
younger brother, Bloom, kind of gets dragged along and he’s enjoying it a
bit less – he wants some real life, and the older brother’s just into
fiction-making. So in that way it’s a story about storytelling.”
Though he’s just 33 and makes an assuming presence behind the monitor, Johnson
seems comfortable with such an experienced cast (“Uh-oh, Mommy’s in danger,”
he whispers with mock concern to wide-eyed Henry and his nanny as a speeding
black Merc clips the door of Penelope’s parked VW Beetle). And, describing
him as “mellow”, Weisz sees some of the same qualities in this tyro director
that she saw in Wong. “Kar-Wei’s a really extraordinary person to work
with,” she says. “It’s all about mood. He creates moods, using music. I
think he hypnotises his actors, actually. I mean, not literally, perhaps,
but that’s how I felt. You get under a spell.
“You know how everyone in his films feels like they’re in the same dream?
That’s what happens to you. It takes a couple of days but after day three I
was in the dream.”
True to form, Wong didn’t give much away during the making of My
Blueberry Nights, giving his cast only the parts of the script that they
were in. Therefore Weisz knows very little about the film, other than that
it stars the musician Norah Jones as a woman travelling across America,
meeting Weisz and her screen husband in Memphis, Natalie Portman in Vegas
and Jude Law in New York. And not only is the film set outside Wong’s Hong
Kong comfort zone, but the characters aren’t his usual quiet dolls, like the
smouldering Maggie Cheung in In The Mood for Love or Zhang Ziyi’s
lovelorn showgirl in 2046.
“I’m this kind of bar-brawling antiSouthern belle,” says Weisz, “who’s married
to a cop who’s older than me. We just keep having these fights. I’m kind of
like a wildcat – it’s a little bit Tennessee Williams in that respect, but
it’s contemporary.”
Which sounds strange enough, until you realise that Wong has done all this in
the dreamy, impressionistic style that first made him a Cannes favourite ten
years ago with the gay love story Happy Together. “The weirdest
thing,” Weisz says, “was being in Memphis, looking at the monitor and seeing
a shot, and thinking, ‘That’s a Wong Kar-Wei movie!’ Even though we were in
Memphis, not Hong Kong.
“I guess that’s how I feel here,” she smiles. “A long way from home. But who
knows exactly where?”
Cannes whispers ...
U2 rocked Cannes with a live concert and a late-night screening of their new
3-D concert movie, U2 3-D. “Happy birthday, Cannes,” said the lead
singer Bono, saluting the film festival’s 60th installment. Directed by
Catherine Owens and Mark Pellington, U2 3-D will be released this
year.
Cannes whispers ...
The actor Billy Zane’s latest movie was panned by critics. Critics laughed out
loud during Fishtales, which also stars Zane’s British fiancée Kelly
Brook. In Fishtales Brook plays Nereid, a mermaid who makes friends
with a little girl and falls in love with her widowed dad, played by Zane.
