HI everybody, i have heard that NIcole Kidmans new film Birth is being produced by Academy Productions and Lou-Yi Productions.
I am trying to find a postal address or website for either of these companies, but cannot find anything on the net.
Could anyone please give me some help with these, if anyone knows where they are based it would be very helpful, or if they know a set address for the film.
Thanks,
Lewis
Release Date
November 5, 2004
Director
Jonathan Glazer (Sexy Beast)
Screenwriters
Milo Addica (co-wrote Monster's Ball)
Jean-Claude Carrière (Belle de Jour, The Unbearable Lightness of Being)
Cast
Nicole Kidman (Anna)
Cameron Bright (Young Boy/Sean)
Danny Huston (Joseph)
Lauren Bacall (Eleanor)
Arliss Howard (Bob)
Anne Heche (Clara)
Peter Stormare (Clifford)
Ted Levine (Mr. Conte)
Cara Seymour (Mrs. Conte)
Synopsis
Academy Award winner Nicole Kidman (The Hours) stars in "Birth" as Anna, a young widow who is finally getting on with her life after the death of her husband, Sean.
Now engaged to be married, Anna meets a ten year-old boy (Cameron Bright) who tells her he is Sean reincarnated. Though his story is both unsettling and absurd, Anna can't get the boy out of her mind.
And much to the concern of her fiancée (Danny Huston), her increased contact with him leads her to question the choices she has made in her life. Birth, a dramatic mystery set in New York's Upper East Side, is directed by Jonathan Glazer, who burst on the scene with the acclaimed Sexy Beast.
(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.themoviebox.net%2Fmovies%2F2004%2F0-9ABC%2FBirth%2Fimages%2Fmain-page.jpg&hash=b4b7b0e75372f45eee3c9df5e2df6369c784589f)
International Trailer Here (http://www.themoviebox.net/movies/2004/0-9ABC/Birth/trailer-page.html)
(when you go to the site, click Bande-annonce and then it's pretty easy.
thanks much.
does anyone knows the name of that Symphony?
So... this kid might totally get type-cast as someone who gets reborn.
Better Quality Trailer Here (http://progressive.stream.aol.com/newline/gl/newline/trailers/birth/Birth_Trailer1_700_dl.mov)
that, i say, is an excellent trailer.
It's an okay movie. Not great. I was pretty into it all the way through until well... let's just say how things wrap up, I'd hate to give away what happens...
Highlights-
- The score... just amazing and wonderful... there's this prominent, simple bass tone that pops in frequently and it's just perfect.
- The actors all deliver good work, and Danny Huston really is beginning to sound like his father.
- Glazer does a 180 on his style and holds back way more than you'd expect (at times it seems, dare I say Kubrick-ian). There's a couple of REALLY extended takes that will leave you breathless.
- Anne Heche says the creepiest thing I've heard in ages.
- A Redmond Barry moment.
Lowlights-
- It all falls on the script, and it's a shame considering the names involved. The movie really spends a lot of time dealing with everyone's reaction to the kid showing up, rather than the how's or why's of his claim. That may be fine for a while, but in the end we're left with too many questions, and not enough answers (and not in the good way).
- The disappearance of Ted Levine (he's the boy's father, shows up early on, then vanishes).
It's not a bad movie... but it COULD have great... *sigh*
The trailer for this is fantastic.
Did it have a weak second act?
why do they keep on putting that kid in movies?
it looks cool, it's got that bridge in central park that's in like every movie. and premise looks cool, but has anyone seen the Italian version of Malena with Monical Belluci? She had steamy sex scenes with little boys, I don't think this movie can top that.
Quote from: petebut has anyone seen the Italian version of Malena with Monical Belluci? She had steamy sex scenes with little boys, I don't think this movie can top that.
So that's why the American version was so awful.
Charlie Rose..
THURSDAY, October 28, 2004
"BIRTH"
NICOLE KIDMAN, Actor
JONATHAN GLAZER, Director
Labor stress made for a painful 'Birth'
Editing of the film, starring Nicole Kidman as an anguished widow, took more than a year.
Source: Los Angeles Times
*READ AT OWN RISK*
LONDON — New Line Cinema doesn't mind taking risks, and the studio has prospered through its wagers on everything from "The Lord of the Rings" to "About Schmidt." But rarely does New Line take the kind of flier its new film "Birth" represents.
The reincarnation drama, about a woman, played by Nicole Kidman, who comes to believe that her late husband has been reincarnated as a 10-year-old boy, was hardly expensive, but its artistic ambitions were unusually difficult to fulfill. Neither a genre thriller nor a glossy melodrama, "Birth" instead occupies an untested middle ground that defies quick categorization and nearly proved elusive for director Jonathan Glazer ("Sexy Beast"), who spent nearly a year editing the film, an eternity for a movie without fancy special effects.
In laboring to pinpoint the film's tone, Glazer grew estranged from New Line, which complained it was left in the dark about the film's progress. The director and the studio also quarreled over Glazer's oblique style, which emphasizes silent close-ups over expository dialogue. In an unusual move, Kidman even petitioned New Line on Glazer's behalf for more money to film additional scenes.
The filmmakers and New Line say that the finished film is the same movie they all originally set out to make. The tension rests in the thorny path it took to finally get there.
"You are trying to make a film without precedent, and everybody in Hollywood only wants to make a movie with precedent. It was very hard work," Glazer says over breakfast in a London hotel.
"The studio, comparatively speaking, is a commercial studio, and inevitably there is going to be a clash of sensibilities," he says. "Sometimes that is healthy and pushes you to find a solution that is better than what you [originally] did. But I wouldn't want to do it again."
The film, opening Friday, stars Kidman as Anna, a widow on the verge of remarrying a decade after her first husband, Sean, died jogging. Days before Anna is to wed Joseph (Danny Huston), a mysterious young boy walks into her moneyed Manhattan life claiming, "It's me, Sean," and urging Anna to call off the nuptials.
The boy, whose name is in fact Sean, appears to know everything about Anna and her first husband's life together, and pines after this much older woman. Before long, Anna is coming unhinged, unsure whether to favor her still-grieving heart or trust her cautious intellect. Is the boy really her dead husband brought back to life? Or a mean youngster playing a cruel trick?
A dozen filmmakers might have made the movie a dozen different ways. British director Glazer, a fan of Roman Polanski and Stanley Kubrick, intended "Birth" to be a sometimes meditative look into love's obsessive and potentially destructive power, not a horror flick. In place of sprinkling the story with scary screams, Glazer filled its background with joggers, to subconsciously remind the audience of Anna's tragic loss.
"We kept hearing, 'This is not going to work,' " says screenwriter Milo Addica, who shares the "Birth" writing credits with Glazer and Jean-Claude Carrière. "I was constantly being told what we were trying to do was inconceivable."
What could be inconceivable to some studio executives was precisely what motivated Glazer in the first place. "It's a very difficult piece to pull off," the director says. "It's a knife edge.... But the studio was afraid I was making haiku."
In searching for the proper tone, Glazer passed 45 weeks huddled in the "Birth" editing room. The movie started filming in February 2003, before Kidman made "The Stepford Wives." Huston has acted in four movies since he made "Birth."
Yet even with so much time in post-production, Glazer was adding to "Birth" mere days before its September debut at the Venice Film Festival.
An evolving idea
A kid falls in love with a woman. He tells her he's her dead husband. And over the course of the movie, she believes him and goes mad with love.
That's how "Birth" began — as a provocative one-paragraph idea scratched out years ago by Glazer. He gave his idea to Carrière, the French co-writer of "The Unbearable Lightness of Being," and soon Glazer considered casting Robin Wright Penn as Anna.
Carrière's initial screenplay interpretations of Glazer's idea focused more on the boy's story. Addica and Glazer then reshaped the plot to emphasize Anna's predicament. Kidman was cast soon after a meeting with the director.
The script required no shortage of fine-tuning; Addica says he worked on more than 21 drafts, often writing in the midst of principal photography. "If I showed [the first draft] to you, you would say, 'What is this?' " Addica says of how much the screenplay evolved.
It is understandable how New Line developed its haiku worries. In one rewrite, Huston was handed a new screenplay page that had no revisions except for an additional comma.
"I would say, 'Is this right? Is this for real?' " Huston says. "But they were looking for these moments, these pauses, where characters were not expressing what they felt. It's kind of this minimal approach. Every breath a character took would become very meaningful."
The real hurdle, though, was Glazer's trying not to turn "Birth" into some sort of Stephen King fright tale.
"At every turn, you are faced with the notion of absurdity and risibility. It's very dangerous," says Glazer, who also is an accomplished commercial and music-video director. "What I was going for was, 'If I believe what the boy is saying in this scene, then Anna will believe it.' You want the audience to hope with her for something impossible."
Rather than hand his characters long expository scenes to spell out their feelings, Glazer relied instead on extended close-ups. One shot mostly of Kidman's face lasts nearly three minutes, and you don't even know if Anna is attending the theater, the opera or the symphony at the time — that's not what Glazer cares about. In place of heavy-handed music that telegraphs emotions and chills, composer Alexandre Desplat's score features ethereal fairy tale arrangements.
"Jonathan was swinging for the fences," says Mark Ordesky, New Line's executive vice president of production. "The genre version of this movie would have been very easy to make. The real high-end, arty version wouldn't have been easy, but it would have been easier" than what Glazer settled on, Ordesky says.
Given his aspirations to create a film that can't easily be categorized, it's not shocking that Glazer struggled to find his film.
"I was forever cutting, trying to make it work," Glazer says, adding that he trimmed about 25 minutes from an early version of the film. "In my mind, [the finished film] is a long way, actually, from what I shot."
Difficult scenes
There is at least one scene in "Birth" that is troubling to watch, and it already has earned the film some notoriety. Late in the story, Anna has started to believe the child she sees is the man she once loved. She thus decides to share a bath with the young boy, and the two climb naked into a tub.
Kidman says that in order to perform that and other difficult scenes with the younger Sean, she acted opposite the now 11-year-old Cameron Bright as if he were a grown man, even though they shared video games during their breaks. If Anna considers this boy her dead husband, Kidman's thinking went, I must also believe it as an actress.
"People say the movie makes them feel hypnotized, and I think Anna is in a way hypnotized by the boy," the actress says. "I never saw Sean as a 10-year-old boy. When we stepped on the set, I was very, very distant with him and never treated him as a child.
"In 'The Hours,' I got to hide behind Virginia Woolf. In this film, the story says so much about how a woman loves ... that you have nothing to hide behind. It's a very vulnerable place to be in."
At one point, Kidman called the studio to ask for more money so that Glazer could film some additional scenes. The movie had finished under its original $25-million budget, and Glazer wanted the balance to go into the film. "I will defend and fight for and protect my directors like a crazy woman," Kidman says. "Jonathan needs protection."
New Line was miffed that Glazer had Kidman ask for the money rather than request it himself, but it approved the money for the additional scenes. The studio also agreed to Glazer's last-minute request to insert an opening scene of a child's underwater birth, even after that reel of the film had been "locked," or completed.
In a public vote of confidence, the studio showed "Birth" at last week's Hamptons International Film Festival, which is essentially the hometown festival for New Line co-chairman Michael Lynne. In front of its target audience of upscale, college-educated adult moviegoers, "Birth" played very strongly, the studio says. The film may face a tougher test with national moviegoers, who are not used to being challenged like this.
"The process of excavating his vision from the material was very difficult," Ordesky says of working with Glazer. "The studio's challenge was to provide Jonathan with the time and the freedom to find the film. But I would make another film with him, as would the studio."
The film's Danny Huston says that he once told his father, the celebrated director John Huston, that he thought his father's "The Man Who Would be King" was a great adventure film. "What's an adventure film?" John Huston said to his son, meaning that there were simply good films and bad films.
"We love to pigeonhole and define things," Danny Huston says. "The more interesting films are the ones for which there are no definitions."
****spoiler******
masterfully done -- very enigmatic -- the first two acts were breath-taking -- nicole was magnificent -- i thought the film lost traction at the end - yet it still worked upon further thought - my biggest problem was anna's lack of "interrogation". every one came out of the wood work with questions, yet it seemd implausible that anna never sat him down and really explored his knowledge of the past -- who better to maket the call than her, his wife. i guess one could argue that she wanted to believe him so much that she was willing to dimiss any doubts.
I saw this tonight in the worst possible setting -- in a multi-plex, where the sounds of some very loud movie thundered through the walls and where the only other people who felt like seeing this particular film must have been expecting The Stepford Wives, judging by their (very loud) reactions throughout -- but it still transfixed me. It's not perfect, but it comes so close to greatness so frequently that it's problems are fading in my head even as I write this (those problems are outlined by Weak2ndAct and cowboykurtis, although I didn't have quite as much of a problem with them). The final scene is breathtaking, and the long shot of Nicole Kidman's face earlier in the film (you'll know it when you see it) is perhaps her best bit of acting yet. A shame this movie is bombing (I wonder why they didn't give it the platform route -- it would have made the same amount of money), but how great is it that a movie like this can get made at all?
why didn't more people see this movie? it was one of the best things i've seen all year.
It is advertised all over London. I am rapidly losing faith in the American culture.
I loved it.
I saw it last night and while I didn't love it, I'm with Weak on mostly everything he said, especially the score.
This movie finally came to my local theater. I thought it was okay overall. It was like they started with some really good ideas and didn't flush them out enough. I almost think it would've been better if the boy was a little older like a teenager. Having a 10-year old boy in some of the situations he was in was more likely to cause some bad laughs, which it did for many people. The score is enchanting though and it had some beautiful and artistic touches.
Quote from: bonanzatazwhy didn't more people see this movie? it was one of the best things i've seen all year.
apparently this has just been re-released in a handful of theatres. atleast here in DC it has. nicole kidman was on leno showing a clip from it last night and i thought it was a repeat. :saywhat: weird.
i think this was the most underrated/overlooked film of the year
It made my top ten list, and Alexander Desplat's score is my favorite of the year -- I've been listening to it non-stop.
Quote from: themodernage02nicole kidman was on leno showing a clip from it last night and i thought it was a repeat. :saywhat: weird.
I thought the same thing. It seems the trend now is celebs going on talk shows when the DVD for their film is released too.
i didnt like Sexy Beast. should i go see this, or wait for the dvd?
Quote from: themodernage02i didnt like Sexy Beast.
why? :ponder:
anyone have a dvd release date?
2/22
New Line will release Birth on 4/19 (SRP $27.95). Look for anamorphic widescreen video, Dolby Digital 5.1 audio and trailers.
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Quote from: I2/22
Quote from: MacGuffinon 4/19
Ah crap! hate it when that happens
Excellent 2nd feature.
Glazer reaches for Kubrick and, several times, actually grasps him. The sets and muted tones were perfect, everything seem to happen in a chilly indoor version of that long, circular opening shot (which was a gorgeous symbol for birth itself and reincarnation).
I knew this movie was brilliant when idiots in my audience laughed at the most awkward scenes.
this is pure garbage so far. the first hour, including the performances, writing, visuals, pacing, editing, music etc. operates on an inhuman, dumb, pretentious logic. this is not the way real people behave. for example, the totally inappropriate laughter and pausing in nearly every scene in the first 20 minutes. also, if i was the reincarnated husband of someone, i wouldn't walk up to them and say "i am your husband." and then stare at them for a long time. pretty much everything every character says is stupid on some level. i feel stupid hearing it. i may write an update when/if i'm finished.
I agree, picolas. Birth is one of the most self conscious films I've ever seen. It's a beauty pageant contestant.
spoilers
i thought it was very atmospheric, and that gave it a certain charm. I was enjoying it until it turned out it didn't have a supernatural element afterall, then i was let down. It reminds me of Soderberghs Solaris. A film that lets the mood carry it for the first half, and it's really really good. Then it falls apart.
Quote from: flagpolespecialand to the person that said that people don't talk that way. you're exactly right. but people don't talk the way they do in kubrick films either.
but you can understand why the characters are saying what they're saying and the way they're saying it. the dialogue may be a little stylized, but it's still human. it means something.
also, i said people don't
behave that way. maybe people have spoken those words somewhere, but they didn't say them like that or under those circumstances because it wouldn't have made any sense.
there are certain things about people and living things in general that you just CANNOT violate if you're trying to tell a (not horrible) story about them. that's what bad movies are, basically: people doing things that don't make any sense.
Quote from: Weak2ndActIt's an okay movie. Not great. I was pretty into it all the way through until well...
Lowlights-
- It all falls on the script, and it's a shame considering the names involved. The movie really spends a lot of time dealing with everyone's reaction to the kid showing up, rather than the how's or why's of his claim. That may be fine for a while, but in the end we're left with too many questions, and not enough answers (and not in the good way).
It's not a bad movie... but it COULD have great... *sigh*
yep. OR i could go for the more extreme review. it was shit. seriously. but i saw it and now i never have to again.
i saw this. the first 3/4's of the film was flawless. just great atmospheric creepy shit...well done. bu tthe end was so fucking dissapointing. on every level....i was sadly dissapointed. sort of like th etime when i was a kid and really young i would take showers w/ my daddy. [in america sometimes kids do this when they is baby's and stuff. so, if you are reading this please dont think sexually, keep your filthy minds out the gutter] ...all we would do is my daddy woudl set the water temperature in th eshower b/c i was to young to know when sometrhign was hot. then he would get my favorite scented shampoo and he would help wash my sticky hair and i could wash th efront of my body but since i couldnt reach my back, my daddy would was it for me! :-D but [too make a long story short] i would look between my daddy's leg and see a "penis" which i learned about later in life. my daddy's was big and mine was small :( and i was hoping for the day my penis would grow big like my daddy's-but alas, it never did.....so there in lies the dissapointment....
but people should still see this film...
drunk post?
NEON, YOU ALWAYS SAY JUST THE RIGHT THING :oops:
I find that in the months following the top ten lists I write every year, certain titles that may have fallen lower on the list gradually float to the top while others fade away. Case in point: I don't think much about Million Dollar Baby these days, but Birth continues to get better and better.
Criterion, give this film the release it deserves!
i stand by my initial thought that this movie was doomed to be misunderstood.
overrated garbage.
thread rebalanced :!:
Quote from: picolasoverrated garbage.
thread rebalanced :!:
feeling's mutual. it's really not overrated, just on this site
I really love this movie. I don't care what anyone says.
I love almost everything about it. I love Nicole Kidmans performance, I love the score, I love the pacing, the editing and I love what Glazer is doing with it. The only weak link to me is the boy, but that's overshadowed by Kidman, who is so good in this. Initially, I hated where it went, but that was only because I was expecting something it wasn't, and now I just really see this movie for the great film that it is. If there was ever a film to revisit, this is the one.
wow. posting in a thread almost five years to the date since the last time anyone had anything to say about it. guess i've gotta see this movie.