In the Future with Joe Carnahan

[Hunter Rider]

http://www.comingsoon.net/news/movienews.php?id=18018

Source: Heather Newgen
December 15, 2006

Universal Pictures' Smokin' Aces ends the five-year stretch of time we've gone without seeing anything from intensively creative writer-director Joe Carnahan, who told ComingSoon.net on Thursday that he's now on a roll and has a couple of other projects in the works.

"If things go well, I'm going to do something almost immediately with Reese Witherspoon, which will be a lot of fun and then I do 'White Jazz' at the end of next year with George Clooney," Carnahan said. "My brother adapted it. I got to work with him on it. If this business will have me, I will continue to make films and not wait so long in between."

The film he's referring to with Witherspoon is a remake of Otto Preminger's 1965 movie, Bunny Lake is Missing. The film surrounds the events that occur after a woman reports that her daughter Bunny Lake has gone missing. When police find no evidence that she even existed, they being to question the woman's sanity.

"It sounds almost sacrilegious to say that I think it could have been done a lot better because logical you look at the film in this day and age and there are certain things that didn't add up. Doug Wright who wrote 'Quills' who I adore, loved that and won a Pulitzer, wrote a script and I thought, 'what the hell am I doing? I'm sitting around. I'd like to get into it.'"

He added, "Also what I love about the possibilities of it, it's like coming out of 'Smokin' Aces', it's like getting sent into war with the bazookas and the grenades and the flame thrower, and then going into a movie like this. It's like someone hands you a paperclip and says, 'fight your way out.' So I love that. I think artistically it's a great challenge to do something like that. Whether or not I blow it remains to be seen."

While Carnahan is excited about "Bunny Lake," he's really looking forward to White Jazz, based on the James Ellroy novel, as he is a huge fan of the author's work.

"No one has had a bigger impact on me creatively, certainly writing wise than Ellroy. So to be able to participate in something like 'White Jazz' is extraordinary knowing that something is very dear and near to James. It obvious has legions of fans to those books and trying to honor that and at the same time knowing there are certain things you need to contemporize and certain things that are not sacred."

In fact, he's so into talking about it, that he told us about the style he'll be taking with the thriller.

"The great thing about it is that the script really deposits a complete antihero. George's [Clooney] decision to play a guy who murders an innocent man kind of wontedly and with a great kind of violence 10 minutes into the movie. My approach to it is not going to be like 'L.A. Confidential.'"

Carnahan says that "if you think 'Smokin' Aces' is freaky, I don't know what people are going to make of 'White Jazz' because anyone who has read the book knows that's a whack job of a book. I look at it and go that's f**ked up. I'm not really looking to invoke the movies of the '50s or to shoot it like a period piece. I'm really going to shoot it in a much more fashion like 'Narc.' Movies have this tendency where they kind of shift in time or they take place in the '50s or '60s. There's almost this need to make everything very glamorous. It's just odd to me. Everything becomes very kind of fluid in this really overly reverential way. I don't want to do that with 'White Jazz.' I want to shoot it like an episode of 'Cops' in 1958 just to keep it loose and fluid and overlapping and messy and chaotic would be my approach like the book. Shoot it like the book is written.

For now, you can see Carnahan's latest work when Smokin' Aces hits theaters on January 26.

Really looking forward to seeing what he does with White Jazz

 

[Carmine Falcone]

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