Information about two days of shooting in NOLA

DAY ONE:

Today, the house in which William S. Burroughs received a visit from Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady in 1949 in Algiers, a suburb of New Orleans, is all spruce, surrounded by newer houses. Nothing to do with the large hut with verandas that threaten to collapse that Kerouac describes in On The Road.

Three years ago, when they first attempt to bring the book to the screen, Walter Salles and producer Rebecca Yeldham had found that the planting of Magnolia Lane, the loop that the Mississippi just before Algiers would make a nice home Old Bull Lee and Jane, avatars shadow of Burroughs and his partner Joan Vollmer. The veranda that runs around the house threatens to collapse so he had to support it so it can support the team (100 people) and equipment of On The Road, the movie.

The house is guarded by Ronald Samuel, an old man with blue eyes who speaks Cajun. He delights in evoking the nearby cemetery where slaves were buried recalcitrant. Planting of Magnolia Lane is haunted - you can easily check on the internet. Ghosts await the departure of the team, which leaves no space. That said, we must admit we could have made Amy Adams for a spectrum. Arriving on the plateau, the sight of that woman pale, disheveled, holding a broom in hand, talking, chewing his words, scary and painful to see. She stars as Jane, a mother is an addict who insult to the feminine ideal in force in the United States in the aftermath of World War II.

In a darkened living room that hovers between the vocations of writer's lair and playground himself to be a Capernaum, I see Viggo Mortensen, collapsed in an agitator, a side holster A child sleeping on his chest. The sleep of the child that he must be silent, even between takes.

There is also a little girl with dirty hair and arms covered with bite marks. Case makeup, of course. But the impressive status of the child does not go beyond the text of Kerouac speaks of "a fair child of the rainbow. The precise circumstances of the encounter between Burroughs and travelers have been made by Barry Gifford in his Book of Jack. Walter Salles will take into account the truth behind the fiction of On the road, while allowing herself as much freedom as Kerouac it was granted. So tomorrow, Wednesday, Old Bull Lee was amused to learn gun in his garden, rather than throwing knives, as it is written in the novel.

Viggo Mortensen, whose character is shocked by an injection of heroin, remains a distant presence for the viewer who does not see that just on the small video monitor. So that instead of star of the day belongs to Elizabeth Moss. The young actress has escaped a few days of the series "Mad Men" to play the neglected wife, Galatea Dunkel, as Old Bull Lee and Jane collected grudgingly, after she was abandoned by Ed Dunkel (the British comedian Danny Morgan) on the advice of Dean Moriarty. Elizabeth Moss repeated a dozen times, from different angles, an indignant tirade, varying at infinity of vengeful anger to self-pity. In moments like this, we forget the frustrating fragmentation of film work to get to force the game, like the theater.

PS These impressions will not shoot pictures. It is not until the director, producers and various representatives of a distribution that is staffed by some of the values of Hollywood's most coveted agree to find out what similar characters and settings.

DAY TWO

At 9:00 am, the team was on the plantation. Eleven hours later, everyone is left in the night. On the shelves of French cinema, time to take the place of American bad wolf in the children's stories. If you are not working well, teams and players, you will work as long as people in Hollywood. Views closely, these long hours do not scare, they are impressive.

On Wednesday, we shot four movies, including two that do that in two lines in the script of On The Road. In the first Jane Lee (Amy Adams) reads a story to his children, Dodie, a little girl of six or seven years and Ray, who did not three years. Viggo Mortensen, who plays the father of two toddlers, Old Bull Lee, brought a book on the set of illustrated nursery rhymes, including The Old Woman Tossed Up in a Basket (the old woman launched into the air in a basket). This book reads as Amy Adams as the two blond toddlers have carefully makeup fouled. When we know the time it takes for a normal child to get dirty, we can only marvel at the effort to imitate nature. Read by a mother fueled by Benzedrine, the rhyme becomes an intoxicating collage of words and threatening.

On the veranda, actors étuvent gracefully. But the temperature remains cool in comparison to that prevailing in the small kitchen of the old house. Here the three women of the distribution, Kristen Stewart, Amy Adams and Elizabeth Moss held a secret conference. The last two vigorously scour the floor while Mary Lou (Kristen Stewart) by Dodie shampooing. These chores are a pretext for a course of education in love that the two women in the world - Mary Lou and Jane - administer to Galatea (Elizabeth Moss). Viewers of "Mad Men" already know that there is an affinity between the young actress trèsforte and innocence (or abstinence) of America of Truman and Eisenhower. On receiving the good news of prophetesses erotic free love, she made a head turn surprised and thoughtful.

When night begins to fall, it's the turn of Viggo Mortensen to be baby sitters. The scenario is that he plays with the little while Mary Lou Ray contemplates frames hanging on the wall of the entrance to the plantation. There are only two replicas: the girl asked about the presence of a particularly ugly picture (a canvas cabin also released collections of Viggo Mortensen) is what Old Bull Lee says he is there precisely because it is ugly. But this exchange, repeated again and again without the camera never stops, is now enshrined in a dialogue that the actors improvise with the boy. Initially, Viggo Mortensen coax a child friendly voice, offering to draw classical figures. Once the mini-player is confident, Mortensen takes the husky voice and accent of Old Bull Lee who strangely resemble those of William S. Burroughs. He began to suggest designs of vampires, the small insect Ray, happy, oblivious to the oddity of the solution.

Eric Gautier , the cinematography is also camera operator (a matter of principle for him, he turns with Alain Resnais, Sean Penn, Olivier Assayas, or Ang Lee) accompanies these changes as Walter Salles bends sometimes a whispered word the ear of an actor. The air of New Orleans, the speech rhythm of beat, improvisation, all back to jazz.

Source: sotinel.blog.lemonde.fr