Little Known Facts A Novel - By Christine Sneed Page 0,76
Marek Gilson and Elise Connor spend half of the film looking like bewildered Abercrombie models plunked down in the middle of Waterworld.
—The Miami Herald
Aside from the Herald’s Waterworld cheap shot, after I read the reviews, I felt like I wouldn’t need to sleep for about two weeks straight, like I could run a two-hour marathon or grow wings and fly to the top of Mount Kilimanjaro. It is one thing to be celebrated for a film you’ve done a good job acting in, quite another if it’s a film you’ve dreamed up on your own, written the screenplay for, hired the cast and crew, cobbled together the funding for, and then spent more than eight weeks in the sweltering heat of an on-location shoot and directed everyone to the best performances of their careers. This is my Apocalypse Now, my On the Waterfront, even, perhaps, my Citizen Kane. To celebrate, Elise and I flew up to Napa and had dinner at the French Laundry, where, in a stroke of mad generosity, I treated all the other diners to their meals. It cost me about twenty-eight thousand dollars, but I handed the waiter my credit card, and aside from making everyone’s day, I probably made some friends too.
No Palme d’Or, but the Best Picture Oscar isn’t out of reach. Reviews this good usually mean that it will stay in theaters for at least a month and then move on to the second-runs. After the Golden Globe nominations are announced in December, and a month or so later, the Oscars, the first-runs sometimes pick up the nominees again. I have some good foreign distributors too, and I’m confident that Bourbon is going to be a hit overseas. Foreign audiences love films about American tragedies. Our tragedies make their own, which are often worse, seem a little less terrible. There is also so much poetry in sadness, a very different and possibly more potent variety than the kind of poetry you find in happiness.
After Elise, Marek, and I went to the premieres in New York and Los Angeles with a number of other Bourbon people, we flew to London for the UK premiere, and afterward we had dinner with Mick Jagger, whom I’d met when we’d worked on a picture together several years earlier. Jagger is very worldly, self-possessed, and witty, and that night, he could not keep his eyes off Elise. I told myself that I should be used to this by now, but it’s hard for me to watch other famous men ogling her, especially if they are both a rock legend and a legendary womanizer.
Sometimes I think that I’d be happier if I broke it off with her and went out with a woman closer to my age, one who isn’t an actress, but I cannot see myself giving her up. I can’t imagine meeting another woman as beautiful, talented, and sweet-natured. Maybe two of the three, but no more. We’re either together until I die, or she will have to be the one to dump me.
Belle’s calls were arriving less frequently by the time Bourbon was released in the States, and Elise was in better spirits than she had been for a while, so we had a good time in England. But a week after the UK premiere, Elise had to leave for three weeks in Montreal for a new project, then two more in upstate New York before she’d be back in Los Angeles, where they’d wrap the film after one final week on a Paramount sound stage. I was going to be away for a few weeks too, doing a role in a French film that Jean-Pierre Jeunet, the genius behind Amelie, was directing. Aesthetically, we’re pretty different, but I love his films and he apparently really liked Javier’s Sons and The Zoologist and now Bourbon. When he approached me with the role for The Hypnotist (L’Hypnotiseur), it seemed a safe bet that we’d work well together, provided I let him do all the directing, which admittedly is getting harder as I get older. I often visualize how I’d shoot a scene instead, or how I’d have written the dialogue, and this causes me something like physical distress. I’m definitely not the first person this has happened to—Clint Eastwood is someone who again comes readily to mind, and Paul Newman, two fine actors whose directorial projects often worked out too. No matter what, it’s hard to take orders, especially when you think you’re smarter or more creative