The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things

[Pwaybloe]

Synopsis:

"The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things", is based on JT Leroy's critically acclaimed novel of the same name. The story is about Jeremiah, a child who is pulled from his foster home and thrown into a troubled life on the road with his teenage mother, Sarah. With Sarah, Jeremiah travels through the country roads of the U.S. and learns first hand about the troubles of the world. With an impressive cast includingOscar winner Peter Fonda (Easy Rider, Ulees Gold), Jeremy Renner (S.W.A.T), and Asia Argento (starred opposite Vin Diesel in XXX), The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things will be one of the most anticipated independent film projects of 2004.

Offical Site


Pwaybloe's Komment Korner:  Parts of this movie were filmed a few miles from my house.  I actually got to go on one of their "sets" when they were filming here last September.  Pretty amazing stuff for a good ole Southern boy.

Undeniably, the filming in my town caught my interest, so I started researching about the movie.  I have yet had the time to read the novel, but I have been able to read a couple of J.T. LeRoy's short stories.  I have to say that I was highly impressed.  

Most of you may have heard of his novel, "Sarah" (which is also prepping to be made theatrically), and his flamboyant cult-like fascination with the trendy Hollywood elite.  Look over that shit and check out his writing if you can.

[Stefen]

Trashy broads. Awww yeah.

[Pedro]

the trailer on the website is just bizarre...i dont know if this will be any good.  doesn't look like it.

[Just Withnail]

The trailer made it look like a feature lenght Nirvana video. In my eyes that's positive. Never read the book, always planned to, didn't know about the film until just now, am definitely looking forward.

[cron]

<---

[Gloria]

I really think this movie looks unique...the trailer looks kind of surreal in a realistic way...if that makes any sense.  Anyways, I'm looking forward to it.

[ono]

Gotta say it.  Awful title.  Yeah, it's after a novel, so that's the author's fault.  But after Scarlet Diva, I'll see whatever Argento makes.  I do hope her next project after this is original.  The trailer is a breath of fresh air.  There is a distinct difference between trailers for American movies and trailers for films "foreign" to us (not that this is a foreign film -- it is in English, but will have some sort of foreign sensibility to it).  Scarlet Diva is only one example of that sort of trailer.  But most of them seem to have an entirely different disposition, mentality, in everything about the way they're constructed.

[El Duderino]

i liked the trailer and was also shocked to see that the blonde kid from elephant is in it. good to see one member of that cast climbing the ladder.

[MacGuffin]

FEATURE - Straight from the HEART
Author J.T. LeRoy and Italian born actress and filmmaker Asia Argento explain how they came to collaborate on film with the likes of Peter Fonda, Winona Ryder and Marilyn Manson. Source: FilmStew.com

J.T. LeRoy, undoubtedly one of the most gifted, compelling writers of his generation, always knew his work was well suited to the big screen. But it has taken a while for him to convince Hollywood.

An international bestseller at the age of 24, this survivor of the streets began writing in 1993 at the urging of his therapist, Dr. Terrance Owens, who was working to help him overcome the horrendous abuse he suffered as a child. His impressive first novel, Sarah, the compelling tale of 12-year-old lot lizard Cherry Vanilla, garnered critical acclaim when it was released in 2000. His second novel, the heart-wrenching, brilliant and semi-autobiographical The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things, brought him more fans, one of whom was 29-year-old Italian actress and filmmaker Asia Argento.

Best known in America for her role in the Vin Diesel blockbuster XXX, Argento became fiercely committed two years ago to the idea of adapting LeRoy’s second novel for the big screen. “It was one of those things, where everything just came together at the right time,” explains LeRoy, in his soft-spoken West Virginian drawl, during a recent interview with FilmStew. “It almost seemed fate-driven.”

“It seems like, in the first part of my life, I got rid of all the unhappy coincidences,” he continues. “I did enough for a million lives. And, now, there are happy coincidences.”

As the daughter of actress Daria Nicolidi and famed filmmaker Dario Argento, Argento was contacted by LeRoy’s Italian publishing company about participating in a reading for The Heart is Deceitful. After getting past the first 30 pages, which she found difficult to read because of their depiction of brutal child abuse, Argento says she was completely sucked in.

“I understood the importance of a story like that, and how positive it is for somebody who survived that to be able to tell that story to the rest of us,” she maintains. “I started seeing these images and being chased by them, and the images of these characters started living inside me. It became my obsession, something that was more important than anything else.”

With LeRoy based in San Francisco and Argento in Rome, the two initially began corresponding via email. “I just really felt this intense connection with her,” LeRoy recalls. “She told me that she wanted to do [the film], and I was just like, ‘Well, okay.’ I felt her energy right away. And then, when I went to Italy, I met her and lived with her for awhile, and we became very close.”

Thanks in part to a writing process that typically has LeRoy envisioning his fiction as a string of cinematic images, he was eager to test the Hollywood waters with his first novel Sarah. But the experience was not a happy one.

“My first reaction to my agent was, ‘Okay, let’s take Sarah to Hollywood,’ and they were like, ‘Well, it doesn’t really work like that; they come to you,’” LeRoy remembers. “So, they got me some crappy Hollywood agent who was very patronizing and I was like, ‘Forget this.’”

In hindsight, LeRoy can understand why he may not have made as big an impression as he had hoped. He had no track record; he was trying to break some well-established rules; and he was, overall, somewhat naïve about the whole process.

Unlike some filmmakers who adapt source material for the screen, Argento decided to involve LeRoy every step of the way. “I told her, ‘It’s yours. Do whatever you want. I trust you,’” he says. “And she kept saying, ‘No, I want you involved.’”

“I told her, ‘Once you invite me in, I’m gonna be in,” he explains. “I won’t be able to close that door.’ And, she said, ‘That’s what I want.’”

Ironically, LeRoy found that Argento and her collaborators had a more thorough knowledge of the book than he did. “They used [the book] like a Bible,” he says. “There were things they knew about it that I didn’t even remember. I was hearing it and going, ‘Oh, that’s good dialogue,’ and then I was like, ‘Wow, I wrote that.’ Because I blocked a lot of it out.”

After Sarah was published, LeRoy spent a year reading it to himself almost every night. Each time he would open the book to a particular passage, he says he was able to enjoy the realization that he truly liked what he had written. Not so with his second, more horrific novel.

“I tried [to do that], and I was just cringing,” he admits. “It’s too painful. So, I was just really amazed at how much of the film was really from the book.”

As a sign of how successful Argento was in her mission to stay true to LeRoy’s vision, the author says he felt like he was trapped in the past when he first visited the set. “It was very overwhelming,” he confesses. “I had this very surreal moment when they were filming in a truck.”

“I had to cross the truck stop when I went to the bathroom,” he adds. “It was this big, long, empty space, and it was dark. I was coming back from the bathroom, and I had this moment of feeling like I was in the past. The only way to get to the present was to go where they were filming my past. That anchored me to what I was in the present.”

Along with spending time on set, LeRoy also spoke with the actors by phone about their individual characters. It was all part of Argento’s feeling that the movie could therapeutic for him as much as anything else.

“Some people pay for a shrink, but I know a lot of directors that use their movies to deal with their demons,” she suggests. “A lot of directors think they’re smarter than the author of the book and they want to make it theirs. I didn’t think I was smarter.”

“For me, it was almost like an exercise of style, trying to exactly recreate the images I saw in the book,” she continues. “So many times, I love a book and go to see the movie, and I don’t find the book. I deeply cared about being loyal to this book, to somebody’s memories and their courage to deal with their memories.”

By all indications, Argento has succeeded. The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things is a stunning and hauntingly artistic portrait of a child, Jeremiah, who is pulled from his foster home and thrown into a troubled life on the road with his drug-addicted prostitute mother, Sarah (Argento), who occasionally dresses him up to pass as her sister. The stellar supporting cast is almost too long to list: Academy Award-winner Peter Fonda, Winona Ryder, Ben Foster, Kip Pardue, Michael Pitt, Jeremy Renner, John Robinson, Jeremy Sisto and Marilyn Manson.

Although Argento was not personally acquainted with any of the actors before she cast them in the film, she saw many of them react to the book or script the same way she had. “Initially, Peter Fonda didn’t want to play the bad guy,” she remembers. “He told me he had been abused - I don’t know by who or by what - but I explained it to him and he understood that somebody had to play the bad guy because this story was important.”

“Peter believed that the film carries an important message for survivors of abuse,” she explains. “It was the same thing with all the other actors.”

Among the lesser known standouts in the film are 8-year-old Jimmy Bennett and 12-year-old identical twins Dylan & Cole Sprouse, who take on the role of Jeremiah at varying ages. Since the movie kept getting pushed back, Argento was afforded more of a opportunity to work with her youngest cast members than she might otherwise have enjoyed.

“The fondest memory I have of the whole film is working with those little geniuses,” she insists. “I had them staying away from the script as much as possible because I remembered, as a young actress, that sometimes when you’re young and you keep repeating the same lines, they become kind of cold and detached.”

“I would have them study the lines right before we shot the scenes,” she continues. “I didn’t care if they forgot or changed it. What we worked on was for me to understand how to get to their feelings, and for them to trust me and know that I was their friend and someone to rely on. I’m very glad I got to do that because it taught me a lot, as a director.”

As a result of her work on the LeRoy adaptation, Argento was hired to coach Bennett for his role on the upcoming Bruce Willis blockbuster Hostage. She says that working in this capacity for the film’s French director was a lesson in humility.

“For me to be able to be on the set without being the star, it made me so proud to see him shine,” she says. “It was also a healing experience because, as a young actress, I would always go to the set with a nanny or a person that production would pay to be nice to me.”

As The Heart is Deceiftul has made its way through Cannes, Toronto and AFI Fest, it has managed to leave critics equally divided. Still, with a European distribution deal already set and a U.S. deal in the works, both Argento and LeRoy feel that the right people are getting it. “The problem is, when something new comes along, people who should know better, like film critics, get freaked out,” says LeRoy. “[The film shows] a new archetype.”

“There’s the 50's archetype of the repressed housewife; then, there’s the 60's and 70's sexually liberated mom,” he explains. “And then, there’s a new archetype of the 80's mom, that a lot of people my age had, which was a mom that did drugs and was a punk. I think that, when some critics who are older -- and I hate to be ageist, but age can just be a matter of their mindset -- see this, they don’t recognize that they are seeing a new archetype.”

“They just [compare] it to the only thing they can peg it to in popular culture, which is Courtney Love. They think, ‘Oh, she looks like Courtney Love,’ which she doesn’t. She looks like my mom; no one’s playing Courtney Love.”

LeRoy also made a point in The Heart is Deceitful not to demonize any of the characters but make each one of them a flawed, three-dimensional individual. “There are a lot of grays in this movie,” LeRoy maintains. “The truth is, in every movie, the kid gets saved when the social worker comes to town. This shows that a social worker doesn’t fix sh*t, which was my experience. A lot of times, they make sh*t worse.”

For her part, Argento suggests that one of the strongest endorsements of LeRoy’s creative vision came from her father after seeing the film. “He told me he thought the movie was a masterpiece,” she recalls. “He has never used that word for anything I’ve ever done.”

“He also said, ‘You will only be able to make this movie once in your life.’ I’m happy if somebody watches it and gets something from it. The movie is not only my work, it’s the work of a lot of people that believed in it. And, most importantly, it’s J.T.’s story; he trusted me to make it into a movie.”

Currently, Argento is working on an idea for a new screenplay while LeRoy is juggling multiple projects. In addition to the aforementioned Sarah, which is still being developed as a film, there is his recent novella Harold’s End, plans for a third novel, two evolving scripts and partnership discussions with filmmaker Gus Van Sant. Not to mention writing lyrics for the much buzzed about band Thistle.

“I grew up around music,” explains LeRoy. “[Astor, the guitarist, and I] used to write together. It just happened in a very organic fashion. Kind of like how my book got passed around, people started passing around the demos, and it got passed to the Rolling Stones’ lawyer, and they were just like, ‘This is great. Put together a band.’ And so, Drew Barrymore put us in touch with [the singer] Speedie , who’s great, and we put together a band. And, now, we’re doing a soundtrack for an Andy Warhol film.”

“I think people are really surprised when they hear I have a band because they expect it to be some really inaccessible industrial noise,” he continues. “The subject matter might be intense, but it’s got a sweetness to it, enough so that I’ve been approached by the creators of Blue’s Clues. I wrote a children’s script for them, and I’ve been talking to them for years.”

“Also, Random House approached me about writing children’s books. People get the childlike aspect of my writing. The music is just an expression of that.”

[MacGuffin]

Asia Argento has created a heartbreaking film called The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things. It is based on the novel of the same name by JT Leroy and Asia stars in it as Sarah the teenage mother who comes back after four years to take back her son Jeremiah from his foster parents. She and Jeremiah crisscross the country while Sarah continues to use hard drugs and introduced Jeremiah to abusive boyfriends. Jeremiah must strive to pull himself out of what his mother has dragged him into.

Asia is best known as the daughter of horror film auteur Dario Argento and actress Daria Nicolodi. Asia became an actor early in her life and eventually became acclaimed in B. Monkey and a few of her father’s works. In 2000 Asia wrote, directed and starred in the film Scarlet Diva.

Daniel Robert Epstein: How did you find the novel in the first place?

Asia Argento: The publishing company in Italy contacted to do a reading. I had read the previous book Sarah before. I immediately thought of a film when I read it.

DRE: Did you see yourself in it?

Asia: No. I saw these characters, I saw the landscapes, the light, everything. I saw a film that resembles very much the way the film came out.

DRE: You come from a family with a lot of insanity in it except you are all artists. Were you able to relate to the story on that level?

Asia: Well my family’s not like that. But my upbringing was very problematic and I didn’t have a happy childhood. I wouldn’t go back to my childhood for anything. What saved me was the work. I started working very young and that’s what saved me and made me more confident. I learned to love myself a whole lot through my work. Misfits are often artistic because it seems that instead of going to a shrink, they work. That’s what I did and I think I felt sorry for my character. At first I hated her when I read the book but the more I studied the character, I found that I couldn’t demonize her. I could judge her actions and think its wrong but at the same time I wondered why she is like that. What happened to her and made her like this? So I demonized more the society we live in that abandons a 14 year old girl. We think all women have mother’s instinct but what if one doesn’t have it? Sarah didn’t, so she did what she could with where she came from and her tools.

DRE: She seemed very human and real. How did you approach playing this character?

Asia: A lot of it was from the book because since I thought it was somebody’s real story I wanted to be very careful not to change it so much. But the character had a life of its own. At first I thought I wouldn’t be so affected by playing this character. I’ve acted all my life so I thought I could create characters and then go back to my life. But all the time I spent with this character, researched this character and living with this character sucked away my life. Not that I became Sarah, but it was creating these emotions in me and then playing them creates some chemicals in my body that made me crazy. I always say Sarah directed this film. The film would have been very different if I didn’t act in it because a lot of things the crazy things in it that I’m proud of came about because at the moment I was so crazy.

DRE: I read that you knew JT Leroy was actually this other person.

Asia: I didn’t know until the New York Times article came out. I suspected something because Laura Albert was always present. Twice I was alone with JT, who I know now is Savannah [Knoop], and I had the impression that maybe she was a girl. But I wasn’t sure of that. It was pretty shocking when I found out.

DRE: Did it disappoint you?

Asia: No. First of all, I’m happy this didn’t happen to somebody. Even though I’m sure it has all happened to someone. I hold no grudge because I thought it was genius what Laura Albert did. Unfortunately in this male dominated world if it had been Laura Albert who had written this book, we wouldn’t have cared as much. I had to ask myself a lot of questions why I wanted to believe this so much. I don’t need to believe works are autobiographies even if they are. Why do people need to believe that my first film, [Scarlet Diva] is autobiographical, when it’s not. Nothing is true in anything we read, even newspapers.

DRE: The scene in The Heart… that was most bizarre is when Jeremiah seduces your character’s boyfriend in drag with you playing Jeremiah.

Asia: That’s a cinematic trick. I wrote it like that. When my best friend Gaspar Noé read the script, he said “I’m not sure about that scene.” Then when he saw it, he was like, “That’s like the most disturbing scene I’ve ever seen.” He thought it was his favorite scene in the film. I could have never shot that scene with a kid, so it was because of necessity but at the same time it turned into my favorite because it’s one of those cinematic tricks that you remember.

DRE: What made you decide to go with animation for the birds in the film?

Asia: The crows symbolize violence. It’s something that the child creates to accept the horror he’s living so it becomes a kind of cartoon. He is a boy that has never seen a cartoon so I imagined this very old school animation. I didn’t want to make it modern, computer generated image so I [animator] Christiane Cegavske shot that for two months in my garage. I found Christiane on the Internet. I saw this small clip she did and it looked exactly how I wanted the scenes to be. I gave her complete freedom but I was observing while she worked in my garage.

DRE: Unleike Scarlet Diva, The Heart… doesn’t have any nude scenes in it.

Asia: With the children and all that, I didn’t feel the necessity to have that in this film.

DRE: How did you cast The Sprouse Twins?

Asia: When I wrote the script, I never thought I would find young actors to play this role. I interviewed Dylan first and he blew my mind. He was so wise, so profound. He moved me. Both were two of the most profound and deep people I’ve met in my life. Such great professional actors, a lot of older actors could learn from these kids. I learned a lot from them.

DRE: Like what?

Asia: They just do it. When they have to cry, they just cry. They don’t take it all apart.

DRE: What is the English translation of the Catherine Breillat film you are in?

Asia: Une vieille maitresse, An Old Mistress.

DRE: What do you play in that?

Asia: I play the mistress. It’s a costume movie but it’s not as pornographic as her other films. She’s a woman director that I look up to a lot. Without her movie, Romance, Scarlet Diva never would have never existed. She opened the door for me. She’s somebody who freed a lot of women sexually through her movies.

DRE: You’re also in Sofia Coppola’s next movie, are you making a conscious decision to work with female directors?

Asia: No. They ask me to work. Usually it’s not the actor that decides, it’s the director. So it’s them that are calling me and I say yes. I’ve been lucky because I haven’t worked with a lot of female directors before. Sofia is somebody who’s completely different to me as a director. On set I am pretty crazy, a pretty nervous type, not very kind, not very calm. She’s the opposite. She’s very calm, very kind, very relaxed, keeps it together without going crazy like I do. She’s able to have kind conversations, detached but at the same time brilliant. I look up to that, I wish I was like that.

DRE: Since you both come from big filmmaking families, did you find that you and her have a lot of in common?

Asia: Not at all [laughs]. But that’s great. I love that most people are often completely different from me.

DRE: I’m sure after xXx you got offered a lot of movies like that. Did you not want to do them or were you too busy?

Asia: I was lucky that after xXx I found The Heart… book and making the film became my most important goal in life. So because I was loyal to this film, I didn’t take any acting jobs for a long time. I got a lot of offers for action movies and kick ass chick roles. But I couldn’t do it because of my film. I just missed that train, which is a lucky thing because my career could have taken a totally different direction. Now I’ve been doing a lot of great and demanding roles and I could have just become a chick with a gun.

DRE: Do you want to keep acting or just direct?

Asia: I think after directing this last movie I appreciate acting a lot more because I asked so much of myself and I learned that acting can be creative. I always thought acting was just showing up on the set and not a lot is required from actors. Then I worked with this French director Tony Gatlif [on Transylvania] and that was the best experience I ever had as an actress. We did a movie in Romania with gypsies. It was very tough and I started appreciating acting again.

DRE: What’s a typical day like for you in Rome?

Asia: I don’t leave the apartment very much. My daughter goes to school and I sleep while she is there because I work at night. When she comes back from school I stay with her for the rest of the day and then at night I read, I listen to music or whatever. So I barely leave my apartment unless I am DJing. I would never go to a club unless I’m DJing.

DRE: Even though you had an unhappy childhood, do you get along with your parents now?

Asia: My mother is present; my father is not very present in my life. But he wasn’t mean to me as a child, he was just absent. Everyone has a parent that sucks. I never heard somebody say that they had a great childhood.

DRE: I got to speak to John Roecker about Live Freaky Die Freaky. He said that when you read the script you were like, “I know Roman and I don’t know if I can do this.”

Asia: I don’t know Roman, it’s just that I love him so much. He’s my favorite director and the only director I’m obsessed with. Actually the only time in my life I was star struck is when I met him. I was all wobbly. He’s somebody I really look up to and I imagine what he must have suffered so I didn’t want to upset him.

DRE: But you understood where John was coming from with the film?

Asia: Yes, I thought it was fun and very beautiful.

DRE: Would you say disturbing movies are the genre you like to work in the most?

Asia: Well I have no idea what I’m going to do next. I never plan for them to be disturbing but they turn out to be like that. I must be a disturbed person because that’s what intrigues me.

DRE: What disturbs you?

Asia: There are things that disturb me but also intrigue me like abuse against children. It was almost an ethical reason to make a movie about it. I watch movies that talk about child abuse in such a sweetened, unrealistic, moralistic way and I wanted to make a film that would make people think about it. As opposed to things like Walt Disney, where the mean guy dies or there’s redemption. Real life is not like that.

DRE: You are considered quite the sex symbol; did you see that as a means to an end at one point?

Asia: I grew up with people telling me I was very ugly and awkward and then when I grew up all of a sudden it changed. I started making movies and people started thinking that I was pretty which didn’t make sense to me. Then photographers started asking, why don’t you take your clothes off, expose your tits. I was very flattered with people thinking that I was pretty and it’s funny for somebody like me who is very intellectual me to become this sex symbol. It’s really the opposite of what I am. Through it I am able to live a part of myself that would never come out in life if I didn’t have the chance to invent this sexy bitch from hell persona. It’s a way for me to deal with the world. People think I’m stronger than I am. I make them think that so that’s what helps me go out of my apartment every day.

DRE: When was the last time you got a tattoo?

Asia: I got this cross on my left arm last summer. I was on vacation and this tattoo artist said to me “Please can I give you a tattoo, it’s so important for me. I can put it on my website.” He was so gentle, I was like “Sure, can you just do a line like this and a line like that?” Also I love jail tattoos. My newest jail tattoo is one done in my handwriting. I disappoint the tattoo artists all the time because I want to just want jail tattoos. But I decided that I’m going to continue the angel that stops on my bush. I want to continue it down and maybe on the side. Maybe make it into a mermaid. I contacted Leu the famous Swiss tattoo artist. For the first time I’m going to have a really great tattoo artist, because all my tattoos were done randomly.

[Pwaybloe]

I finally got to watch this last night.  It was pretty good, but not great.  Common complaints that I've read is that it jumps around violently, but that's derivative of the book.  Another common complaint is that it's not as good as the book, which is true, but rarely is a movie better than its source material anyway.  I think everyone here agrees with that. 

Regardless, my mini-review...  Well, the movie was much tamer than what I was expecting.  The role of Sarah wasn't portrayed as a complete psychopath like I imagined she would be.  She was more... aloof.  There was a lack of Southern Gothic that I was wanting, so it felt like it could take place anywhere, which I hated.  It should be a Southern tale (it was filmed in Knoxville, TN).  The religious fanaticism was there - but not enough, scenic depravity - but not enough, iconic figures - but not enough.  The movie felt rushed and wasted some great supporting roles.  The pacing and editing were awkward, but I again believe that was intentional (the book is comprised of related short stories). 

The one thing that I respected was that the movie never became gratuitous.  It never went overboard or became so outrageous that it felt fake.  The book was the complete opposite at times.  Asia Argento was outstanding in front of the camera (maybe not so much behind it), and she's really the reason to see the movie.  To her credit, when she is off screen the movie drags.  The kids that portrayed Jeremiah did pretty good with what the production team could get away with an R rating.  Not being able to show more of what Jeremiah is thinking and feeling unfortunately softens the blow of what real torture and abuse is. 

Those who haven't read the book will have a difficult time watching.  Not so much the content, but the pacing, editing, and the lack of Jeremiah's descriptive thoughts will be the downfall. 

For those who are wanting to check this out on DVD, beware.  Palm Pictures has admitted there is an authoring error around 1h 18min that jumps a few minutes ahead.  I originally thought this was another awkward cut, but it was indeed a mistake.