Post by Ace on Feb 14, 2009 19:21:36 GMT -5
Looks like Blood & Champagne is still around (though maybe under a different name) , and Pierce is producing but not starring. A damn shame, he was perfect for the role. He probably thinks he's too old know since Capa died in his 40s.
www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/article5732879.ece
From The Sunday Times
February 15, 2009
Pictures from hell that made a man of Capa
A Scottish director is on a mission to capture the swashbuckling spirit of an iconic war photographer
Capa was in the thick of the action on D-Day, top; such bravery has inspired McGuigan to film his life story
Richard Wilson
It was one line at the end of the script that captivated Paul McGuigan. When he read that Robert Capa, the acclaimed Hungarian photojournalist, named his agency Magnum after the size of champagne bottle he habitually ordered, McGuigan felt compelled to bring his story to life. “He was swashbuckling: handsome, smart, brave and charismatic,” the director says. “I thought, ‘I could really work with this character.’ ”
A film about a photographer, albeit one who earned global renown for the stark intimacy of the iconic images he captured in the Spanish civil war and the second world war, is a departure for McGuigan.
Hollywood took a shine to the Glaswegian’s approach to film-making after the release of Gangster No 1 in 2000, an occasionally brutal yet polished crime drama. When McGuigan first arrived in Los Angeles, Bruce Willis phoned to invite him to his house, where he was screening the film for his friends. Willis went on to star in Lucky Number Slevin, another uncompromising thriller, along with Josh Hartnett, Morgan Freeman and Sir Ben Kingsley.
His commitment to a modish realism frames his latest film, Push, which is released next week. Starring Chris Evans, who was in Fantastic Four, and Dakota Fanning, the child star of War of the Worlds and The Secret Life of Bees, the movie revolves around individuals with psychic powers. Typically, however, McGuigan insisted on filming in the cloying bustle of Hong Kong using the minimum of computer-generated imagery. “I tried to make it as real as I could,” he says.
That authenticity is vital is a deeply held conviction for McGuigan, who in preparing the Capa project has scoured the photographer’s life story with a meticulous eye. But then Capa — who often said: “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you aren’t close enough” — would have cherished the film-maker’s intent. From Hungary to Germany, from France to Spain, McGuigan has trailed his subject, seeking a sense of his spirit. In all its contours, there is a pronounced sense of drama in Capa’s story, a disturbance of the mundane that increasingly adhered itself to McGuigan, a photographer himself before turning to film-making. “I did a little European tour. I went to Paris and found where he lived,” he says. “I did the overnight train the way he would have done, from Paris to Madrid — which sounds romantic but wasn’t. You’ve really got to understand the character in order to do the film justice.”
Capa’s images of conflicts adorned the front pages of weekly magazines such as Time and Life. His work came to define the sweeping brutality of warfare and made Capa famous. He is credited with establishing photojournalism as a potent form of news gathering, while Magnum, which he founded with fellow photographers such as Henri Cartier-Bresson, became the world’s most influential photo agency. Even now, he is a vital figure in photography, and the Barbican gallery in London recently held a three-month exhibition of his work.
Capa’s life was a heady mix of drinking, gambling, womanising and a stringent dedication to capturing the gritty reality around him in his pictures. Yet even his name was a fiction. Born Andre Friedmann in Budapest in 1913, with an extra little finger on one hand, he moved to Germany when he was 20, then fled to France after the Nazis came to power. Struggling to find work, he changed his name to Robert Capa — basing his creation on Frank Capra, the film director — because he felt an American name would lead to more commissions.
His dramatic wartime images established his uncompromising reputation. When troops landed on Omaha Beach on D-Day in 1944, Capa was among them, chest-deep in the sea, capturing the horrifying, unremitting confusion and devastation of the invasion. The images were striking. The blurred edges, the stark grimness, the sudden, dense disorder, told something of the reality of the soldiers’ experiences. “He wasn’t the world’s greatest photographer,” says McGuigan. “It wasn’t about the composition with Capa. It was getting really close up. What was amazing about him was that he was so brave. He was willing to risk his life because other people around him were doing the same. In those days, there were no rolling television news reports, so his one shot had to mean something, had to signify something, to let people understand the brutalities of war.”
Steven Spielberg used the D-Day images as the basis for the opening scenes of Saving Private Ryan, but other threads connect Capa to the cinema. Ernest Hemingway — one of a coterie of Capa’s friends that also included Irwin Shaw, John Steinbeck and John Huston — wrote For Whom The Bell Tolls based on Capa’s experiences during the Spanish civil war and the movie version starred Ingrid Bergman, with whom Capa had an affair. The currents of that relationship were then the inspiration for Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window.
Capa was a roguish, captivating man, ruggedly good-looking beneath his thick, dark hair. When he left a skiing holiday in Klosters to embark on what turned out to be his final assignment, covering the first Indochina war in Vietnam — he was killed in 1954 when he stepped on a landmine — he was said to have boarded the train with a bottle of champagne and someone else's wife.
McGuigan believes Capa was haunted by his most celebrated photo, The Falling Soldier, which captured the moment a Spanish soldier was shot dead in a field. The picture was later claimed to have been a set-up, although having studied the image, and the shots before and after it, at a Capa exhibition in London, McGuigan holds a different view. “Capa never talked about it,” he says, “and what happened, in my opinion, was that the soldier was showing off, mugging for the camera, and then got shot. So Capa felt it was his fault.”
With Pierce Brosnan’s company, Irish Dreamtime, producing the Capa biopic, McGuigan has been spreading his gruff charm around Los Angeles in the recruitment of a leading man. He has also asked Panavision to mount old-style lenses onto modern cameras, to allow a more realistically grainy hue, and will eschew ambitious panoramic shots of battle scenes for the more claustrophobic, concentrated point of view that Capa would have seen through his camera lens.
“I want to make it more cinematic, more immediate, more violent, more real,” he says. “I was sent the script because I’m seen as a director with a certain visual style. It wasn’t until Pierce that they found out I was a photographer. This has become a passion project.”
McGuigan’s own photographic career revolved around the thin glossiness of advertising. Then he moved into documentary making. One film he directed for the BBC, Little Angels, showed a teenage girl injecting heroin into her neck.
He still lives in Glasgow with his wife, Elisabeth, and two children, but spends much of his time in Los Angeles.
An edginess is never far from the surface with McGuigan, and it most readily emerges when he confronts the subject of Scottish Screen and the structure of the film industry in his homeland, where he believes that talented individuals are being held back by maladministration.
“I wish I could work in Scotland but nobody cares or wants to do anything,” he says. “Ten years ago, the Scottish film industry was so buoyant, but it’s dead at the moment. I despair about the people giving out the cash. If you don’t have a lifeline, you have to go somewhere else, so film-makers wander off to LA or London. They don’t get the chance that I did.”
McGuigan is passionate because he cares — that is how he lives and works. It is a credo that Capa might have understood.
www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/article5732879.ece
From The Sunday Times
February 15, 2009
Pictures from hell that made a man of Capa
A Scottish director is on a mission to capture the swashbuckling spirit of an iconic war photographer
Capa was in the thick of the action on D-Day, top; such bravery has inspired McGuigan to film his life story
Richard Wilson
It was one line at the end of the script that captivated Paul McGuigan. When he read that Robert Capa, the acclaimed Hungarian photojournalist, named his agency Magnum after the size of champagne bottle he habitually ordered, McGuigan felt compelled to bring his story to life. “He was swashbuckling: handsome, smart, brave and charismatic,” the director says. “I thought, ‘I could really work with this character.’ ”
A film about a photographer, albeit one who earned global renown for the stark intimacy of the iconic images he captured in the Spanish civil war and the second world war, is a departure for McGuigan.
Hollywood took a shine to the Glaswegian’s approach to film-making after the release of Gangster No 1 in 2000, an occasionally brutal yet polished crime drama. When McGuigan first arrived in Los Angeles, Bruce Willis phoned to invite him to his house, where he was screening the film for his friends. Willis went on to star in Lucky Number Slevin, another uncompromising thriller, along with Josh Hartnett, Morgan Freeman and Sir Ben Kingsley.
His commitment to a modish realism frames his latest film, Push, which is released next week. Starring Chris Evans, who was in Fantastic Four, and Dakota Fanning, the child star of War of the Worlds and The Secret Life of Bees, the movie revolves around individuals with psychic powers. Typically, however, McGuigan insisted on filming in the cloying bustle of Hong Kong using the minimum of computer-generated imagery. “I tried to make it as real as I could,” he says.
That authenticity is vital is a deeply held conviction for McGuigan, who in preparing the Capa project has scoured the photographer’s life story with a meticulous eye. But then Capa — who often said: “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you aren’t close enough” — would have cherished the film-maker’s intent. From Hungary to Germany, from France to Spain, McGuigan has trailed his subject, seeking a sense of his spirit. In all its contours, there is a pronounced sense of drama in Capa’s story, a disturbance of the mundane that increasingly adhered itself to McGuigan, a photographer himself before turning to film-making. “I did a little European tour. I went to Paris and found where he lived,” he says. “I did the overnight train the way he would have done, from Paris to Madrid — which sounds romantic but wasn’t. You’ve really got to understand the character in order to do the film justice.”
Capa’s images of conflicts adorned the front pages of weekly magazines such as Time and Life. His work came to define the sweeping brutality of warfare and made Capa famous. He is credited with establishing photojournalism as a potent form of news gathering, while Magnum, which he founded with fellow photographers such as Henri Cartier-Bresson, became the world’s most influential photo agency. Even now, he is a vital figure in photography, and the Barbican gallery in London recently held a three-month exhibition of his work.
Capa’s life was a heady mix of drinking, gambling, womanising and a stringent dedication to capturing the gritty reality around him in his pictures. Yet even his name was a fiction. Born Andre Friedmann in Budapest in 1913, with an extra little finger on one hand, he moved to Germany when he was 20, then fled to France after the Nazis came to power. Struggling to find work, he changed his name to Robert Capa — basing his creation on Frank Capra, the film director — because he felt an American name would lead to more commissions.
His dramatic wartime images established his uncompromising reputation. When troops landed on Omaha Beach on D-Day in 1944, Capa was among them, chest-deep in the sea, capturing the horrifying, unremitting confusion and devastation of the invasion. The images were striking. The blurred edges, the stark grimness, the sudden, dense disorder, told something of the reality of the soldiers’ experiences. “He wasn’t the world’s greatest photographer,” says McGuigan. “It wasn’t about the composition with Capa. It was getting really close up. What was amazing about him was that he was so brave. He was willing to risk his life because other people around him were doing the same. In those days, there were no rolling television news reports, so his one shot had to mean something, had to signify something, to let people understand the brutalities of war.”
Steven Spielberg used the D-Day images as the basis for the opening scenes of Saving Private Ryan, but other threads connect Capa to the cinema. Ernest Hemingway — one of a coterie of Capa’s friends that also included Irwin Shaw, John Steinbeck and John Huston — wrote For Whom The Bell Tolls based on Capa’s experiences during the Spanish civil war and the movie version starred Ingrid Bergman, with whom Capa had an affair. The currents of that relationship were then the inspiration for Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window.
Capa was a roguish, captivating man, ruggedly good-looking beneath his thick, dark hair. When he left a skiing holiday in Klosters to embark on what turned out to be his final assignment, covering the first Indochina war in Vietnam — he was killed in 1954 when he stepped on a landmine — he was said to have boarded the train with a bottle of champagne and someone else's wife.
McGuigan believes Capa was haunted by his most celebrated photo, The Falling Soldier, which captured the moment a Spanish soldier was shot dead in a field. The picture was later claimed to have been a set-up, although having studied the image, and the shots before and after it, at a Capa exhibition in London, McGuigan holds a different view. “Capa never talked about it,” he says, “and what happened, in my opinion, was that the soldier was showing off, mugging for the camera, and then got shot. So Capa felt it was his fault.”
With Pierce Brosnan’s company, Irish Dreamtime, producing the Capa biopic, McGuigan has been spreading his gruff charm around Los Angeles in the recruitment of a leading man. He has also asked Panavision to mount old-style lenses onto modern cameras, to allow a more realistically grainy hue, and will eschew ambitious panoramic shots of battle scenes for the more claustrophobic, concentrated point of view that Capa would have seen through his camera lens.
“I want to make it more cinematic, more immediate, more violent, more real,” he says. “I was sent the script because I’m seen as a director with a certain visual style. It wasn’t until Pierce that they found out I was a photographer. This has become a passion project.”
McGuigan’s own photographic career revolved around the thin glossiness of advertising. Then he moved into documentary making. One film he directed for the BBC, Little Angels, showed a teenage girl injecting heroin into her neck.
He still lives in Glasgow with his wife, Elisabeth, and two children, but spends much of his time in Los Angeles.
An edginess is never far from the surface with McGuigan, and it most readily emerges when he confronts the subject of Scottish Screen and the structure of the film industry in his homeland, where he believes that talented individuals are being held back by maladministration.
“I wish I could work in Scotland but nobody cares or wants to do anything,” he says. “Ten years ago, the Scottish film industry was so buoyant, but it’s dead at the moment. I despair about the people giving out the cash. If you don’t have a lifeline, you have to go somewhere else, so film-makers wander off to LA or London. They don’t get the chance that I did.”
McGuigan is passionate because he cares — that is how he lives and works. It is a credo that Capa might have understood.
