Mike Figgis is summering in Binghamton, N.Y., in the company of Kim Novak, Kevin Anderson and Pamela Gidley.
Figgis, the director of ”Stormy Monday” and ”Internal Affairs,” got to upstate New York, where he is filming ”Liebestraum” (”Love`s Dream”), by way of an eerie cottage in Devon, England, overlooking the sea. The journey took six years.
”I was in a very frightening cottage in England,” Figgis said, recalling the origins of his film, ”with no electricity, no water-a totally deserted place.”
And in one inspired evening, he wrote the plot line of his tale. ”It`s a cycle of fate with definite Oedipal overtones in which a son repeats the sins of his father,” Figgis said.
In the atmosphere of the Devon cottage, he said: ”It was very like that thing of being a child and telling yourself a ghost story. It`s a very frightening story.”
And how did it lead to Binghamton? In two ways.
First, Figgis had to achieve success as a filmmaker, which he did in the intervening years with ”Stormy Monday” and ”Internal Affairs.” ”It`s very much a director`s film,” he said of ”Liebestraum,” ”and I think a studio would really need to trust a director to pay for this film. You need to prove yourself first.”
After Pathe agreed to back him, he had to find a location that suited the needs of his script. That effort, he said, consumed three or four months:
”I was looking for a cast-iron building in a small, timeless American town. Of 50 towns I looked at right across America, Binghamton was the only one that had the perfect building in the perfect setting.”
Figgis went on to explain the need for such a building by saying, ”The central character is an architect who is writing a book about cast-iron buildings.”
And, he added, ”The building has to be in a town that he comes to by fate, because, having been adopted, he is reunited for the first time in his life with his mother, who is in a hospital, dying.”
Kevin Anderson plays the architect; Gidley, the femme fatale, and Novak, the mother.
”I heard she was looking for a film, that she was interested in coming back,” Figgis said of Novak. ”I was asked if I would like to meet her, and I jumped at the opportunity. She read the script, and she jumped at it. It was a pretty instantaneous mutual desire, I think.”
– Emily Lloyd?
Well, she`s been Splendid, thanks.
Splendid, it seems, is the name of the character the versatile English actress has recently finished playing.
Splendid is a spirited young Cajun woman whose wedding is one of the central events in ”Scorchers,” the cast of which includes Faye Dunaway, James Earl Jones, Denholm Elliott, James Wilder, Leland Crooke, Anthony Geary and Jennifer Tilly.
”Scorchers” is based on the play of the same title, a trilogy about Louisiana bayou country written by David Beaird, who directed the film.
The 18-year-old Lloyd, who made a memorable debut as a troubled English teenager in the 1987 film ”Wish You Were Here”-and went on to play a Brooklyn gangster`s daughter in ”Cookie” and the Kentucky child of a father killed in Vietnam in ”In Country”-turns up as a terrified bride in
”Scorchers.”
”The section I did is about a young girl getting married,” Lloyd said.
Splendid`s mother died in childbirth, and on her wedding night in Bayou La Teche, Splendid is busy racing around her bridal chamber trying to avoid her husband, played by Wilder, who eventually turns to her father, Crooke, for help.
Lloyd said she was in Los Angeles reading scripts when she came across
”Scorchers.”
”It was quite refreshing,” she said, ”because so many scripts you read are very vacuous and you get diluted premises of films that have done really well. This was great because it was original, and it was real.”
Lloyd, who will be seen later this summer in ”Chicago Joe and the Showgirl,” based on a World War II crime spree involving an American GI
(Kiefer Sutherland) and his English girlfriend, said she was planning to settle down later this year in either Los Angeles or New York and take some classes, perhaps in writing. She would also love to do some theater in New York.
And naturally, she`ll be looking for more film roles.
”Of course, I really want to work,” she said, noting that it was essential to find scripts that inspire her.
”If you`re not passionate about it,” she said of performing, ”it shows on screen.”
– What`s hot in Moscow?
Well, a few weeks ago, it was ”The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming,” the 1966 Norman Jewison comedy about a Soviet submarine that throws a little New England town into a tizzy when some of its crew come ashore.
”It was like the picture was made yesterday,” Jewison said, recalling the reaction of an audience of 2,000 that saw the film in the October Cinema in Moscow during a retrospective of Jewison movies that took the filmmaker not only to the Soviet capital, but also to Leningrad and Tbilisi.
”It`s been screened six times in the Kremlin, and it had never been shown to the public,” Jewison said, recalling that he was invited to take
”The Russians Are Coming” to the Soviet Union in 1966.
”I think they thought I was some sort of Canadian pinko,” he said.
For this latest trip to the Soviet Union, the producer and director took time out from talking to Michelle Pfeiffer about his plans for ”Other People`s Money” and from poring over Alvin Sargent`s screenplay for the off- Broadway hit, which Jewison hopes to put before the cameras in October.
Responding to an invitation from members of the Soviet film industry, Jewison said he took more than 10 movies, among them ”Jesus Christ, Superstar,” ”In the Heat of the Night,” ”Fiddler on the Roof,” ”Agnes of God” and ”Rollerball.”
”Jesus Christ, Superstar,” he said, was presented in eight-track stereo.
”They played it at full blast with no translation. It was like opening night for the rest of the world. They were bopping and laughing. It was just a tremendous reaction.”
Everywhere he went during his two-week visit, he said, he was honored at dinners given by film industry members. ”The sense was they are so anxious for co-production,” Jewison said.
”They are free to make any film they want. The film workers union is very anxious to take over, make deals themselves rather than going through the minister of film. They want to get out on their own. They want to act as entrepreneurs and producers in the true sense of the words.”
In addition, he said: ”They`re all very excited and they feel it`s a new world. There`s no going back now. And what I think they really need is some help, some support, anything we can do.”
He added: ”I hope I can help, in some way, some of these film directors, either with shooting films in the West or us going there. I don`t see any reason why we couldn`t distribute films in the Soviet Union and take the rubles and invest them in films we`d shoot there or invest them in Russian productions.”
The market is huge, Jewison observed, and the Russians are avid moviegoers. ”There`s no doubt about the business we`d have,” he said.
