LORNA SORE

Saw Rescue Dawn yesterday — and it’s fantastic — especially Jeremy Davies. I don’t think I’ve been excited about an actor or actress since Philip Seymour Hoffman in 1999’s Magnolia. Davies (born Jeremy Boring!) blew my fucking mind away with his performance as Gene, a POW in a Pathet Lao prison camp. He and Steve Zahn both rule. Davies has had an interesting career but I don’t think I noticed him until now.

I remember this too-long article on the making of the film from the New Yorker last year and read it again recently. It’s way too long and boring but here’s a good part:

In what Herzog called a “signal of solidarity,” he was dieting with Bale and Zahn. (By the end of the shoot, in October, he had lost almost thirty pounds.) It was an ethic for Herzog: anything he asked the actors to do, he volunteered to do as well, including eating maggots and handling snakes. If he established a raw, physical mood on the set, Herzog believed, Bale and Zahn wouldn’t feel self-conscious. The crew members, by and large, saw this credo less generously. Herzog, they felt, was unwilling to accept the fundamental paradox of filmmaking: creating a gripping movie often requires weeks of boredom. In their view, Herzog was intent on undergoing his own survivalist drama. A half-dozen crew members shared a jest that Zeitlinger had made: “Werner’s not really a filmmaker. He’s a little boy.”

And if you’ve seen Rescue Dawn or Little Dieter Needs to Fly, this part is interesting, too: “Herzog became close friends with Dengler, who died in 2001. He said of him, “All that I like about America was somehow embodied in Dieter: self-reliance and courage and loyalty and optimism, a strange kind of directness and joy in life.”

This entry was posted on Monday, August 13th, 2007 at 2:57 pm and is filed under Uncategorized.