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There could not be a more surrreal experience than hearing Wim Wenders, the renowned auteur in contemporary cinema, dropping anecdotes about Mel Gibson. The director, however, has no qualms about revealing what the action movie hero does with cigars. "He always smokes cigars between shots - but we were working so quick that the moment...... .....he lit a cigar he would have to go on," Wenders recalls. "He was smoking these expensive Cuban cigars that are not meant to go out, so his assistant had to keep on smoking them - at the end of the shoot he was green all over the face." "Making a movie in America does not necessarily mean the movie is geared towards a mainstream audience. The main difference between commercial and independent movies nowadays is that commercial movies have nothing to say, while independent ones have stories to tell." The Million Dollar Hotel surely is a storytelling exercise par exellence. The film, Wenders says, is "a fairy tale and a love story". With him at the helm, however, even romance can manifest itself only in a twisted fashion. The amouous sentiments between the retiring and childlike Tom Tom (Jeremy Davies) and the dreamy streetwakler Eloise (Milla Jovovich) is set in the institution of the film's title - itself an ironic moniker given the impoverished oddballs who find sanctuary there. "In a way, (the story) is the opposite of the place itself, because it's such a beautiful and poetic story," says Wenders. Alongside the rest of Wenders' canon, The Million Dollar Hotel surely stands out in its subject matter - the absence of travelling (as enshrined in his legendary "road movies" of the 1970s), metaphysical statements (as in the classic Wings of Desire) or contemplation about communicative media (the main fodder for most of his work of the past decade) renders this film as Wenders' most accessible work to date. Shorn of complex notions though this film might be, it was far from being easy to wrap.Seven Years passed before the film was completed, and the resources involved - the crew numbered 300 at the peak of production - were sizeable compared to Wenders' previous efforts. |
Interestingly, Hotel is the brainchild of Bono, frontman of Irish rock combo U2 and one of Wenders' long-time collaborators. Having discovered the hotel - in reality a genuine address for the down-and-out in Los Angeles - during a video shoot, he came up with the story with scriptwriter Nicholas Klein (The End Of Violence), and Wenders, suitably impressed, agreed to direct. The success of the film entails more than the visual splendour that has become Wenders' trademark. The director readily concedes the diligence and craft of his stellar cast, especially the partnership of Davies and Jovovich. "I had never spent so much time looking for actors because I had never had a young cast - people in their 20s - so I had to start from scratch, " he says. "I don't want actors who are merely perfect for the part, but those who have the urgency to pay it." He surely has hedged his bets on the right people. Davies gives a splendid turn as Tom Tom, a character of angelic naivete who "saw the lives these people (in the hotel) could have led", as Wenders puts it. Jovovich, meanwhile, took to extremes in method acting: "She lived in the hotel for months because she felt she couldn't play the part if she was afraid of the hotel and the people in it," Wenders says. For two months, Jovovich walked barefoot, as her character Eloise does in the film. She also refrained from looking into mirrors for the whole shoot, trying to gear herself towards an existence of low selfesteem, a trait of Eloise - who in the film describes herself as "ficticious". Even Gibson - notorious for his bouts of overacting - comes across well, injecting a vulnerability and confusion into the cop figure he has basically played to death elsewhere in junk fodder like Lethal Weapon and Payback. "We all used to see him as a brand name, but behind that, he's still a great actor, just like back in the days of Mad Max and The Year Of Living Dangerously," Wenders says. |
