Twisted

[aclockworkjj]

Twisted



RELEASE DATE: April, 2nd  2004 (according to imdb.com)

CAST: Ashley Judd, Andy Garcia, Samuel L. Jackson, Russell Wong, D.W. Moffett....
WRITER: Sarah Thorp
PRODUCER: Arnold Kopelson, Anne Kopelson, Barry Baeres, Linne Radmin, Stephen Brown, Robyn Meisinger
DIRECTOR: Philip Kaufman
PRODUCTION DESIGNER: J. Dennis Washington
CINEMATOGRAPHER: Peter Deming

Premise: A female police officer (Judd), whose father was a serial killer, and is now investigating a murder finds herself the center of her own investigation when her past lovers start dying at a furious pace (Jackson plays a respected cop and Judd's mentor; Garcia plays a coworker and Jessica's romantic interest).

Some interesting excerpts from grew's previews @ yahoo: Here.


At first, I dunno how i feel about philip kaufman doing a ashley judd movie.  even before checking out yahoo, i was thinkin' kiss the girls, along came a spider type stuff.  I hope kaufman sticks to his style, and with the lovers twist...hopefully it's as sexually perverse as his other stuff.  I like the nature in which he tackles sexuality...hopefully he doesn't disappoint here...hmmm.

[ono]

Boink.

What's the word on this film?  Looks like the run-of-the-mill potboiler/thriller.  Saw a commercial tonight, which is what I'm drawing this from.  I'm trying not to go with the "oh, here comes the January and February crap" line of thought, but, well, here it comes.  Unless someone has something to say to prove me wrong.

Oh, and why is Samuel L. Jackson in everything?    (See also: the Family Guy episode where Brian becomes a cop, then a porn director.)

[MacGuffin]

Theatrical Trailer here.

[modage]

"I don't really want to do the same movie over and over again," says Philip Kaufman, whose movies cross virtually every geographical and emotional boundary imaginable. His work spans the gamut from the arctic north (The White Dawn) to outer space (The Right Stuff), and from the erotic life of Anaïs Nin (Henry & June) to the neurotic demise of the Marquis de Sade (Quills).

"My films for me are adventures," the director explains. "I just learn a lot from the different movies that I make." Kaufman's adventures have earned him an Academy Award nomination (for his adaptation of Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being) and a permanent place in film history (for suggesting that George Lucas' Indiana Jones character be hunting for the Ark of the Covenant). After nearly 40 years of directing, Kaufman's screen exploits are finally bringing him back home to San Francisco in his latest film, Twisted, a dark thriller with kinky overtones.

Twisted marks yet another departure -- only his work on 1993's Michael Crichton adaptation, Rising Sun, compares to this psychological murder mystery -- and a return to the director's home base: San Francisco. Before making the movie, Kaufman consulted San Francisco's best action movies. Here are five that inspired him most.

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The Lineup
(1958, dir: Don Siegel, starring: Eli Wallach, Robert Keith)
This is a San Francisco psychological thriller, and Ashley Judd plays a homicide detective, so the immediate films [for comparison] would be films like Vertigo, Bullitt and the films of Don Siegel -- like Dirty Harry and The Lineup -- all of which were shot here. There was actually a line of films that had been done here, particularly in the '30s, and I wanted to give Twisted that kind of noir look I think has been missing from San Francisco films in recent years. Siegel made cop movies exploring some of the dark side of things. The Lineup was black and white, and it had a murkier, more mysterious quality to it. When I did Invasion of the Body Snatchers, which was kind of a science-fiction film noir, color hadn't been used much to create an atmosphere of San Francisco, and cinematographer Michael Chapman and I were exploring a kind of shadowy lighting. Twenty years has gone by since I had completely shot a film in San Francisco, so I was eager to sort of explore the city in yet another way. A lot of the locations we used were places tourists might go by and not see the very things our camera might uncover.


Vertigo
(1958, dir: Alfred Hitchcock, starring: James Stewart, Kim Novak)
In general, I hold Hitchcock's films in very high esteem, and not just Vertigo. There's a kind of creepy quality that surrounds his main characters in many of those films. I love Vertigo because of that sort of psychological spiraling down that the Jimmy Stewart character goes through and the mystery of wondering about the psychological wellbeing of your main character, which is essential to our film. Through various plot devices, Ashley Judd's character begins to suspect that she herself might be the very killer she's searching for. [Hitchcock has a habit of incorporating American landmarks into his films, such as the Golden Gate Bridge in Vertigo], but we didn't approach it that way. People will see Golden Gate Bridge or the Bay Bridge or Fisherman's Wharf, but there's a creepier quality to it. The way the fog rolls in, the sound of the sea lions, the pelicans drifting through the fog. We visited a lot of those places, but from an angle that you might not have seen those things. We went under Fisherman's Wharf or we show the city from out on the water. A body is found across the estuary from PacBell Park, where in fact a body was found about six months before we did our scene there.


Bullitt
(1968, dir: Peter Yates, starring: Steve McQueen, Jacqueline Bisset)
Bullitt was a film Ashley looked at very carefully in terms of physical movement and so forth. In some small way, [her performance] may be an homage to Steve McQueen. He had a way of moving, a kind of spare energy I thought was quite remarkable in American films. He was a big star, but I don't know that he was fully appreciated at the time. I believe that there was a lot more to McQueen, and I don't identify that presence with today's stars. They don't have that same kind of efficient energy he had, that way of simply opening a paper or gathering up frozen dinners that made just watching him an interesting thing. But I find Ashley has a great vocabulary of non-vocal facial gestures. You could say that her character is a gender switch on that persona. I was told that the car she drives was the same '68 Mustang McQueen drives in Bullitt, although I don't know if it's true. Ashley didn't want to play the kind of woman in jeopardy that she'd played before. In Twisted, she's strong and she's sexier. You see that she's very capable of violence, and in fact, one of her problems may be that she occasionally has a tendency to be a little bit violent both in arresting a suspect and in sexual play. San Francisco is not the same kind of working-class city as Boston or Pittsburgh may be. We're in this sort of post-dotcom world of single people who have a different sort of lifestyle than you would find in other cities. Ashley Judd's character plays a cop who in her off-duty hours has a penchant for picking up guys, and it's a very San Francisco kind of life that she leads.


Dark Passage
(1947; dir: Delmer Daves; starring: Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall)
When I'm making a movie, I don't necessarily want to work off an overview. It's all inside the character and the motivations, and the idea of a thriller is to move people from one scene to the next with a sense of anticipation. Dark Passage was an interesting film for a San Francisco movie. It was again perhaps a question of identity. Humphrey Bogart plays a man who has perhaps been wrongly implicated in a crime. He escapes from prison, changes his identity and tries to figure out who set him up while he's being pursued. It's a case of somebody struggling with the past to define his identity in some way. To some degree, our film deals with the same things. While Ashley Judd is searching for a serial killer, she is also learning things about her own past that make her perhaps begin to suspect herself. To me, that turns the film into an interesting philosophical question, the idea that we are all searching for ourselves and how we begin to explore things that might indicate our own culpability. It's Kafkaesque in terms of the way the world becomes a trap and a character is thrown back on herself.


The Third Man
(1949; dir: Carol Reed; starring: Joseph Cotten, Orson Welles)
It's not a San Francisco story, but I think The Third Man is very close to a perfect film with maybe the greatest soundtrack of all time. It had a wonderful stylization, based largely on those Dutch angles and the way it was true black and white, but what really interested me was the darkness of the story and the exploration by the Joseph Cotten character into that world. It's a movie I look at often, just as I often look at Touch of Evil, another great highly stylized movie. They are both late noirs. When you look back on the classic period of noir and one of its quintessential actresses, Barbara Stanwyck, there was a validity and truthfulness to her character, but she was rarely in what we would consider movies of high moral or artistic value. They were films that strongly walked the wild side. And Ashley, if you look at her career, has done a lot of things that people don't know about on film, but the main movies that have made her a star have been more of this kind of genre film. I think for the public, she has a kind of unique ability to get people to travel with her character.