Kim Basinger on how Curtis Hanson convinced her to star in "L.A. Confidential" (1997) even though she was reluctant:
"I had just given birth to my daughter when I received the script, I was very in love with being a mom. I read it a first, second, and then third time and said to my agent, ‘You know, I’m not doing this. I’m not playing a wh0re. I’m a mother now.’
I’d done a lot of risqué things in my life. My agent kept on me. ‘There’s something in this script,’ he insisted. Finally, I met Curtis Hanson at the Formosa Café. And that started the seduction of Curtis Hanson.
At the meeting, Hanson was prepared with storyboards and more. He was in a visual mode. He brought pictures of Robert Mitchum film noir. He was such an eloquent beautiful soul – but he was very manipulative! I just said, ‘yes’ [on the spot]."
("Kim Basinger, Guy Pearce pay tribute to ‘L.A. Confidential’ director Curtis Hanson", Artsmeme, 2017)
P.S: On this day, 29 years ago, "L.A. Confidential" (1997) premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, France.
Joel Coen on the works that inspired "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" (2000):
"'O Brother, Where Art Thou?' (2000) started as a ‘three saps on the run’ kind of movie, and then at a certain point we looked at each other and said, ‘You know, they’re trying to get home — let’s just say this is ‘The Odyssey.’ We were thinking of it more as ‘The Wizard of Oz.’ We wanted the tag on the movie to be: ‘There’s No Place Like Home."
("The Coen Brothers and George Clooney Uncover the Magic of ‘O Brother, Where Art Thou?’ at 15th Anniversary Reunion", Zack Sharf, 2015)
P.S: On this day, 26 years ago, "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" (2000) premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, France.
Claire Denis on the whether the autobiographical elements in "Chocolat" (1988) are important to her:
"That is an enormously varied and difficult question to answer. The children of people who worked in Africa before independence—and sometimes even after—share a common secret and a common experience of childhood, stories like that of the plane crash, or the relationship with the African boy, were very ordinary experiences.
But I was surprised when the film was released in France to have received so many letters in which people would say, “I recognize my house and the furniture.” But the truth is that we built that house and the furniture because there are no longer houses like that in Cameroon … they all have air-conditioning now! We built everything, even the table. And yet I received letters like, ��I recognize the cook”, “It was my house you used”, “I was there in ’57”, and I remember one woman wrote, “I was in love with the boy but I never dared to tell him.”
Being a child, you probably have two kinds of memory: there is your own, and then there is a collective memory, which you catch or develop at school, in your community and so on. For instance, I know people who were in Algeria before independence and when they get together they all tell the same stories. I think it’s the same for those people who were in Africa and so I would say that the film is both autobiographical and common to many people."
(Claire Denis' interview Marie Craven and Raffaele Caputo, 2011)
P.S: On this day, 38 years ago, "Chocolat" (1988) was released in France.