Showing posts with label Sam Mendes. Show all posts

Saturday, February 13, 2021

How we made Closer / Owen and Patrick Marber

‘A visceral piece of writing’ … Natalie Portman as Alice and Clive Owen as Larry in the film of Closer. Photograph: Collection Christophel

How we made Closer – by Clive Owen and Patrick Marber

‘I wanted to write a Shakespearean scene with someone in disguise, so I went into a lesbian chatroom pretending to be a gay woman’

Interviews by Chris Wiegand
Tuesday 9 July 2019

Patrick Marber, playwright

I was in Atlanta in 1996 with a tour of my play Dealer’s Choice and I was dragged along to a lap-dancing club. It seemed a potent, haunting place for a scene about power and sex. That night I wrote a version of the lap-dance scene in Closer with characters called A and B. I wanted to figure out who the guy was, who the young woman was, and what happened to them before and after.

1917 review / Sam Mendes turns western front horror into a single-shot masterpiece

1917 review – Sam Mendes turns western front horror into a single-shot masterpiece

This phantasmagoric first world war nightmare from the British director is ambitious and unshakeable storytelling

Peter Bradshaw

Monday 25 November 2019

am Mendes’s 1917 is an amazingly audacious film; as exciting as a heist movie, disturbing as a sci-fi nightmare. Working with co-writer Krysty Wilson-Cairns, he has created a first world war drama of the Western Front and a terrible journey undertaken by two boys like a ghost train ride into a day-lit house of horror, periodically descending into night and then resurfacing into an alien world, bright with menace.

Steven Spielberg to Produce ‘Voyeur’s Motel,’ Sam Mendes Directing

Dave McNary
April 14 2016

Steven Spielberg is producing a movie version of Gay Talese’s upcoming novel “The Voyeur’s Motel” for DreamWorks with Sam Mendes directing.

Mendes will produce through his Neal Street Productions company. Mendes, who directed the James Bond movies “Skyfall” and “Spectre,” has directed a trio of titles for DreamWorks — his debut on “American Beauty,” “The Road to Perdition” and “Revolutionary Road.”

DreamWorks won an auction for the rights to Talese’s novel. CAA brokered the auction.

The story centers on Colorado resident Gerald Foos, who opened a hotel so he could watch guests having sex. Foos had reached out to Talese in 1980 with the following note:

“Dear Mr. Talese: Since learning of your long awaited study of coast-to-coast sex in America, which will be included in your soon to be published book, ‘Thy Neighbor’s Wife,’ I feel I have important information that I could contribute to its contents or to contents of a future book.”

An excerpt of “The Voyeur’s Motel” ran in the April 11 issue of the New Yorker. The novel will be published July 12 by Grove Press.

CAA brokered the deal on behalf of Mendes and Talese. Mendes is also represented by attorney Melanie Cook of Ziffren Brittenham. Talese is represented for publishing by Lynn Nesbit of Janklow & Nesbit.

The news was first reported by Deadline Hollywood.

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