Boarding Gate – Releasing in India

NDTV Lumiere | Uncategorized | July 10, 2009 at 12:21 am

Comments from Olivier Assayas – Director of Boarding Gate

‘Boarding Gate’ releases at PVR Cinemas in Bangalore and Delhi on 17th July

ASIA: ALL INSTINCT
Asia is one of few actresses completely at home on a film set with no regard to stature. She has been on film sets since she was very young so she’s more at ease with technicians on a chaotic set than shut away in a dressing room. Asia has a certain freedom in the way she thinks, reacts, in the choices she makes. This isn’t something she puts on. She simply puts it out there very courageously. She’s innately rock ‘n’ roll, which isn’t very common among actresses. There’s nothing prefabricated about her. She’s all instinct with an uncommon intensity. She’s a surprising actress who doesn’t discriminate the trivial from the sophisticated, B movie situations from the most intimate. She’s completely herself every time, and with the utmost generosity. Each take she comes up with something new, but she’s always in the heart of the film, in the heart of her character. She has a nearly unreal bond to the camera.

MICHAEL MADSEN
I met Michael Madsen through Nick Nolte, which was a good sign. I was looking for an actor with a strong physical presence who could play both dangerous and seductive. When I contacted him, he was able to find the time in his schedule to do the film. He was patient enough to stick with us every time we moved the shooting dates. We only needed him 10 days or so as his character shot only on three locations in Paris.

WHEN MICHAEL MET ASIA
The scenes between Asia and Michael were shot in chronological order. Their first shot together, the one with the cufflinks, was actually their first meeting. They had never seen each other before. Seduction started instantly between them, but also a certain defiance.
He’s a bit of a bear. He tries to completely identify with his role, to get under the skin of his character. This can be risky for him and those around him. Asia is pretty radical herself, so this produced a real electricity on the set. It was like a pressure cooker between them, as if they were constantly competing, checking each other out.
Even if the shots were carefully laid out and the movements very choreographed, Michael always shook things up with his unpredictability. Both Asia and I had to manage to follow him. Sometimes even against him, we had to firmly hold on to the line of the scene. He broke a plate, he spit out a pit on the other side of the room, etc… Conversely, there are things that he resists, that he balks at doing, that he reacts to at a different moment.
Everything had to constantly be integrated into the film. Asia is on the front line so she has to react in real time. I’m behind, but I still have to take in everything and re-orchestrate so as not to lose the whole concept of the sometimes very long sequences. Michael can be very over-the-top and go to extremes. After a certain point, he can take you to some very scary places. Things can get out of hand and situations can take on a troubling truthfulness. Asia called his bluff and took some big risks. Michael didn’t seem to like the idea of being pushed to the limits by a girl. For example, the sex play scene with the belt. I originally wrote something much simpler. But Michael had some very precise ideas about what Asia should do to him. There were some takes that scared both of us, Asia and me!

KELLY LIN AND CARL NG
Since I was going to shoot in Hong Kong, I wanted to do my film under the same conditions as Hong Kong cinema. I wanted to look toward the new generation of actors directly there instead of trying to cast out of Paris. Carl Ng, who plays Lester, is an actor-model who grew up in London. He’s the son of Richard Ng, a star from the 80s. He has very strong presence which I immediately found right for his relationship with Asia’s character. Kelly Lin has worked with directors like Johnny To and Patrick Tam, and she’s one of the best new Chinese-speaking actresses around. Boarding Gate is the first time she acts in English in an international film.

SONIC YOUTH’S KIM GORDON
I’ve known Kim Gordon for a while now. I met her and Thurston when I used one of their songs in my film IRMA VEP (1996). Then we stayed in touch. I had always been a fan of their work for many reasons, most of them having to do with experimentation and their use of improvisation. So it was very exciting for me to have the opportunity of working with them on the score of my film Demonlover (2002). I also filmed them live, mixed with some experimental footage in my film NOISE. I knew Kim wanted to act. She had been in Gus Van Sant’s Last Days. I knew she had spent some of her teenage years in Hong Kong where her father was, I think, teaching. So I had no trouble imagining her as this Cantonese-speaking American based in Asia.

SHOOTING IN HONG KONG
We were only a few Europeans on the set: Asia, the cinematographer, the sound engineer, the assistant, the script supervisor, our line producer and me. The rest of the crew was local. They understood that we were going to shoot like them: fast, hand-held. But they are accustomed to rushing about with the Steadycam, so they were amazed and puzzled by our precision regarding the shots and our obstinacy at redoing them until we got exactly what we wanted.
The unexpected difficulty we met in shooting the Hong Kong way was that their crews are big. Salaries are low, so there are numerous technicians for every job. For example, never less than six people around the camera. Also, the people of Hong Kong tend to be pretty noisy. This posed a problem when we did guerilla shots in the middle of a crowd. The crew had to be really careful to be as limited and discreet as possible. Sometimes we had to invent these schemes, pretend to prepare a shot just to keep the excess crew occupied so that we could go somewhere else and shoot something else.
In such guerilla conditions, the toughest thing is that you’re forced to do a lot of illegal shots, like shooting in the subway without permits. We did that with a team of four people. We did two takes, then ran off. We did the same thing at the airport because we were restricted to shooting from a certain boutique in the main hall. Of course, it was impossible to get everything we needed from only this point of view.
Our Hong Kong crew was terrified of airport security and they tried to stop us from doing anything illegal. We had a hard time getting them to do the shots we really needed. I have to say that I understood their reluctance because I would never do something like that in Paris!

HONG KONG
I went to Hong Kong for the first time in 1984 as a journalist. But I had already been making short films for a while and was in the process of writing my first feature. I had never even been to the States yet, so Hong Kong was my first contact with a modern city from a European perspective. I stayed there for a few weeks, running around the city, meeting all the great filmmakers from the golden era of martial arts movies. It was an incredibly inspiring experience. Their notion of cinema was completely different from whatever I was acquainted with in the West. So, I suppose it had a way of turning upside down a lot of the more conventional notions I had of how to make films. I guess it also had the side effect of making me kind of an oddity within the spectrum of French cinema. The actual feeling of the city itself had this strong impact on my approach to writing and directing. I returned to Hong Kong occasionally just to visit, but I always knew that one day I would go back there to make a film.

EAST-WEST CROSS-POLLINATION
I try to let real life inspire me and not movies. But movies somehow end up making their way into your subconscious to distort your imagination. In that sense, as there is something dreamlike in this film, also about its way of moving between fantasy and documentary, rough reality and cartoon, I suppose it does owe something to the cinema I love. Not necessarily Asian cinema – I have never thought that there was a separate strain of Asian cinema, but rather that Eastern and Western cinema have, at least during this last decade, been in this process of cross-pollination. It has been one of the exciting events within contemporary cinema and I have always felt part of it.

OPENING UP MY WORLD
I think my career has been about desire, inspiration, and partly about survival. My films and my interests in filmmaking have gradually drifted from the framework of the French film industry, which to my taste has become embarrassingly insular, embarrassingly conventional. It’s a very difficult time for modern French filmmakers. If you’re into mainstream comedies, then no problem, you can do whatever you want on any budget you want. If you are into anything else, then it’s a tough struggle. I have always hoped I was making my films for some kind of international audience, not just for France. But now, when I want to get my films financed in France, they tend to consider me as an outsider. It is becoming increasingly more difficult to get projects moving. So I guess that I might as well go all the way: as absurd as it may seem, it has become more coherent, economically, to make my films in English rather than in French. And in terms of my inspiration, it does open up my world to new stories, new characters, broadens my choice of actors… So there is some logic to it all. And my next film will be a typically French affair.