Al Pacino honored in Venice, presents new film

By Mike Collett-White

VENICE, Italy | Sun Sep 4, 2011 12:29pm EDT

VENICE, Italy (Reuters) - Hollywood veteran Al Pacino is honoured by the Venice film festival on Sunday with a special prize and the presentation of his latest directorial project "Wilde Salome."

Even at such a star-studded festival, where the likes of George Clooney, Gwyneth Paltrow and Madonna have walked the red carpet this year, Pacino drew large crowds of screaming fans and autograph hunters to the Lido island.

He receives the Jaeger Lecoultre Glory to the Filmmaker Award at a gala awards ceremony.

Wilde Salome is part documentary about the staging of Irish writer and poet Oscar Wilde's play "Salome" starring rising star Jessica Chastain, part an exploration of the author and part film version of Salome itself.

Pacino, one of the giants of cinema with eight Oscar nominations including one win to his name, admitted to being a little confused about what type of picture he had made.

"I guess what I tried to do is ... create a story," Pacino told reporters in Venice after the film was shown to the press.

"But I don't know what it is. I like to say it's a documentary because it's not a film, but then it's not a documentary either, so I'm confused too."

The 71-year-old said that making movies for himself, some of which remain hidden away never to be shown, made him fall in love with cinema years ago and become a better actor.

"As soon as I started making my own films, I actually became easier on directors," he explained.

"Because I was very difficult at first. I really didn't know the medium, I didn't know what the needs of a director were. Once I started, the magic of movies came into my life."

The star of films including "The Godfather" and "Scent of a Woman" added that, unlike Orson Welles, he did not abandon the theater once he discovered movies, but continued with both disciplines.

Pacino said Wilde, who was hounded for his homosexuality at the end of the 19th century, was a fascinating subject.

"We do know that he was ... a very liberal thinker and more than that he was a visionary in terms of his feeling for people and how he wanted society to be more humane and that he was really on dangerous ground at that time.

"Part of his sexuality was what they used against him to put him away. They wanted to silence him."

Asked what the future held, Pacino replied:

"I have movies that are still coming at me and I always say that I'm going to be selective. I always say that, but I never am.

"I'm saying again -- 'I'm going to do it only when I feel it's the thing to do for me.' I hope I follow that philosophy. That's my future. It's blank."

(Reporting by Mike Collett-White; Editing by Rosalind Russell)

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Film "Shame" brings sex addiction tale to Venice

By Silvia Aloisi

VENICE, Italy | Sun Sep 4, 2011 10:01am EDT

VENICE, Italy (Reuters) - Up-and-coming Irish actor Michael Fassbender plays a sex addict in "Shame," a movie by British video artist Steve McQueen that is vying for the top prize at the Venice film festival.

It is the second lead role for Fassbender in a competition movie at this year's festival after his portrayal of psychoanalyst Carl Jung in David Cronenberg's "A Dangerous Method."

In Shame, the German-born Fassbender is Brandon, a handsome, 30-something executive living in New York whose only distraction from work is seducing women, masturbating at home or in the office and looking for sex on the Internet.

The tightly controlled rhythm of his life begins to fall apart when his needy, dysfunctional sister Sissy, played by Carey Mulligan, arrives for an unannounced visit.

Her presence, and her craving for Brandon's attention, disrupt his lonely existence even further, and his only way out seems to be wandering the streets at night in search of new sexual adventures.

Fassbender, whose portrayal of Brandon was warmly applauded after a press screening on Sunday, said taking part in the film's graphic sex scenes was not easy.

"Yes (it was) uncomfortable doing the sex scenes, you just have to jump and turn really," he said.

"The most important thing I guess is that everybody involved feels as comfortable as they can. And then just go for it so you don't have to do too many takes."

McQueen, whose debut film was the widely acclaimed "Hunger" about the last months of Irish Republican Army activist Bobby Sands in Belfast's Maze prison, said he saw similarities between the two films.

Hunger also starred Fassbender in the lead role.

"Clearly Hunger was a political film but Shame is also political. That one was about a prison in northern Ireland, this one it's about how someone's freedom can actually imprison them and they need an addiction in order to numb a pain, how our lives have been changed sexually by the Internet," he said.

"I love Brandon, he's trying and it's difficult. He's not so far away from most of us at the end of the day. He is not a bad person, I think the character is not at all repulsive, maybe unfamiliar but extremely recognisable."

The title Shame was chosen after interviews with sex addicts and their experiences in preparation for the film.

"The word shame came cropping up in those interviews," McQueen said.

His career began with film-related projects, he quickly branched out to include sculpture and still photography, and his work has been displayed at the Biennale of Art in Venice.

McQueen said he saw no big differences between his artworks and his feature films.

"There are no barriers between the two. Of course in one you're going to have a bit more narrative and the other less so, but the process is the same, it's work."

Asked why Mulligan had not come to Venice to present the movie, McQueen replied: "It's out of order. She should be here."

(Reporting By Silvia Aloisi, editing by Mike Collett-White)

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A-listers not spared in pandemic film "Contagion"

By Mike Collett-White

VENICE, Italy | Sat Sep 3, 2011 9:23am EDT

VENICE, Italy (Reuters) - Not even the A-listers are spared in "Contagion," a star-studded movie directed by Steven Soderbergh that recreates the outbreak of a global pandemic.

Audiences used to seeing the most famous faces last longest will be in for a surprise when they watch the slick, globe-trotting picture which is in competition at the Venice film festival.

The ensemble cast includes Gwyneth Paltrow, Matt Damon, Jude Law, Kate Winslet, Laurence Fishburne, Marion Cotillard and Jennifer Ehle, most of whom were in Venice for the world premiere on Saturday.

Soderbergh, an Oscar winner for "Traffic" and best known for his "Ocean's" crime capers, said the complex nature of the film made Hollywood heavyweights particularly important.

"It's very helpful to have movie stars playing as many of these roles as you can, because you're throwing so many characters and so much information at the audience it's very helpful for them to get a sort of reference point," he told reporters in Venice.

"There's a reason that movie stars have existed since the beginning of cinema," he added after Contagion was warmly applauded at a press screening ahead of the red carpet premiere.

"It's good for audiences -- they like to have people they can identify with."

Contagion opens with a couple played by Paltrow and Damon who find themselves at the center of a global emergency that goes on to claim millions of lives.

Cotillard and Fishburne play health officials trying to get to the bottom of the disease in a race against time, while Law portrays a journalist and blogger who challenges the official line.

SARS AN INSPIRATION

At one point, one scientist irked by his questioning turns to him and says: "Blogging is not writing. It's graffiti with punctuation."

Soderbergh weaves the bigger themes of fear, panic and globalisation together with individual tales of sacrifice and selfishness, hopping from Hong Kong to London to the United States as he does.

Paltrow was asked when she would allow her pre-teen children to watch Contagion, which features death, violence and a scene where a dead character's scalp is peeled back during an autopsy.

"My kids can't even watch (children's comedy) 'Babe', so I don't know, probably not for a while."

She added that she did not see the death of central characters as any kind of judgment on the lives they led in the movie.

"I think that if death by virus was a punishment for extra-marital affairs there may be only about three dudes left in this room right now," she joked at a packed press conference. "Maybe less because we're in Italy."

Script writer Scott Burns said the story was partly based on the real-life outbreak of SARS in China in 2003.

Soderbergh, who said he would shortly be taking a break from film making, added: "All of the science in the film had to be accurate, all of the scenes in which the virus was discussed or shown visually had to be absolutely realistic or plausible.

"Otherwise we felt we weren't advancing our ideas very well or contributing to this genre very well."

(Reporting by Mike Collett-White; Editing by Mike Nesbit)

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Knightley stars in film on birth of psychoanalysis

By Mike Collett-White

VENICE, Italy | Fri Sep 2, 2011 10:29am EDT

VENICE, Italy (Reuters) - Canadian director David Cronenberg's latest movie "A Dangerous Method" explores the role a little-known Russian woman played in the birth of psychoanalysis at the turn of the 20th century.

Between the recognized titans of the discipline Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, played respectively by Viggo Mortensen and Michael Fassbender, came Sabina Spielrein, portrayed by Keira Knightley.

The psychologically troubled, fiercely intelligent young woman was a real-life patient first of Jung and later Freud.

Some historians also believe she had an affair with Jung, and in the film he sets out on a path of sexual liberation and obsession with his charge prompted by the debauched and dangerous Otto Gross.

For Knightley, a role involving scenes of hysteria and sexual spanking was a departure from the demure, restrained characters for which she is best known.

Asked whether she enjoyed the role, she told reporters in Venice where the film has its world premiere on Friday: "It's great fun. I'm an actress so I'm obviously crazy anyway so I think I drew on that. It's fine."

Cronenberg joked that he chose his cast based on their need for treatment.

"I'd like to just say that my cast has a great need of psychoanalysis -- it was why I cast then actually.

"It was to sort of introduce them gently to the idea that they needed help, a lot of help. And you can see they're much better people. Before they were messes when I found them."

LEADING FIGURE

Spielrein went on to become a respected psychoanalyst in her own right, and in the film her ideas challenge both Freud and Jung to rethink their own approach.

Cronenberg said his cerebral costume drama about what he called an "intellectual menage a trois" was "very accurate."

"There's so much in the letters," said the 68-year-old director of hits like "The Fly" and "A History of Violence."

"At this era in Vienna there were maybe five to eight mail deliveries every day. It was like the internet before the internet.

"There are tonnes of letters amongst all these characters and in those letters they quote each other ... So there's a lot of material out there which is the basis for the screenplay."

Oscar-winning writer Christopher Hampton penned the script, which is based on his own play "The Talking Cure."

For Mortensen, who also starred in Cronenberg's "A History of Violence" and "Eastern Promises," the key to playing such a well-known figure as Freud was not to get too bogged down in the detail.

"In the end it's not an academic exercise, it's not a documentary movie, it's a drama that's interesting, that sometimes is funny, that sometimes is tragic, that doesn't deal with the academic issue so much."

Cronenberg said Freud's ideas were considered dangerous at a time when many people believed man was on a one-way path to enlightenment and progress.

"Freud, with psychoanalysis, said this is not true, this is a very thin veneer of so-called civilization ... and that these ... unconscious things could erupt in a very disastrous way.

"This was on the eve of the First World War, which of course ended the dream of progress and so-called European civilization."

A Dangerous Method is one of 22 movies in the main competition at this year's Venice film festival, and is due to hit U.S. theatres in November.

(Reporting by Mike Collett-White)

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Madonna's crown slips with mediocre movie reviews

By Mike Collett-White

VENICE, Italy | Fri Sep 2, 2011 6:39am EDT

VENICE, Italy (Reuters) - Madonna may be the "queen of pop," but her crown as movie director slipped this week after most early reviews of her second feature film "W.E." ranged from middling to poor.

The picture, which had its world premiere at the Venice film festival on Thursday, is loosely based on the life of American divorcee Wallis Simpson, whose affair with Kind Edward VIII led to his abdication.

Madonna said she had been fascinated by the story for some time, pondering why a man would make such a huge sacrifice for love.

Andrea Riseborough stars as Simpson and Abbie Cornish as a modern-day woman who becomes obsessed with the person who prompted a constitutional crisis in 1936.

Britain's Guardian newspaper did not spare Madonna's feelings with a one-out-of-five star review.

"Could it be that Madonna is in deadly earnest here?" wrote Xan Brooks.

"If so, her film is more risible than we had any right to expect; a primped and simpering folly, the turkey that dreamed it was a peacock."

Others were less damning, although the general tone was negative and one website quipped that it may be time for the 53-year-old singer to abdicate as a film maker.

Todd McCarthy of the Hollywood Reporter opined: "Madonna's second foray into directing is pleasing to the eyes and ears, but lacking anything for the soul."

And Mark Adams, chief critic for Screen Daily, wrote:

"Madonna aims high as she seeks to tackle love, celebrity, fame, abuse and disappointment, often hitting her targets -- and sometimes not -- but always offering up images that are beautifully shot and staged."

He singled out Riseborough's performance, which he described as "quite brilliant."

The Daily Telegraph gave W.E. three stars out of five, while Baz Bamigboye of the Daily Mail was generally complimentary.

"A lot of people will loathe it, simply because it's been made by Madonna," he wrote.

"But if they were to watch it with no knowledge of who directed, they would be pleasantly surprised. They might even find much of it enjoyable, although the odd moment may have them wondering if Madge has committed treason."

Some of Madonna's collaborators on the picture had wondered whether viewers' judgments might be colored by their opinion of the 53-year-old celebrity.

"When an iconic, global entity is involved it will be interesting to see how people react to that and whether people can judge the film without their own baggage or how they've felt about Madonna for 30 years," producer Kris Thykier told trade publication Variety.

The budget of W.E. is estimated to be around $15 million, and it hits movie theatres in North America in December.

(Reporting by Mike Collett-White, editing by Paul Casciato)

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