Forty Shades of Blue

Sundance Film Festival – 2005 Grand Jury Prize Berlin Film Festival/Panorama 2005 FORTY SHADES OF BLUE By Ira Sachs “Atmospheric and haunting… Forty Shades of Blue is a movie that seeps under your skin” David Ansen, Newsweek SALES CONTACT FORTY SHADES OF BLUE Cast Alan ............................................................................................Rip Torn Laura .................................................................................... Dina Korzun Michael ........................................................................... Darren Burrows Lonni.................................................................................. Paprika Steen Duigan ...................................................................................... Red West Celia ...................................................................................Jenny O’Hara Shel .................................................................................. Jerry Chipman Sam ........................................................................... Andrew Henderson April...........................................................................Emily McKenna Cox Cindy .......................................................................................Liz Morton Betty................................................................................Joanne Pankow Filmmakers Director .................................................................................... Ira Sachs Screenwriters ................................................ Michael Rohatyn, Ira Sachs Producers ........................................................ Margot Bridger, Ira Sachs Mary Bing, Jawal Nga, Donald Rosenfeld Executive Producers .......................... Geoff Stier, Diane Von Furstenberg Director of Photography .....................................................Julian Whatley Editor.......................................................................... Affonso Gonçalves Production Designer................................................. Teresa Mastropierro Costume Designer.................................................................. Eric Daman Original Music ................................................................Dickon Hinchliffe Music Supervisor................................................................ Susan Jacobs Casting ..................................................... Avy Kaufman, Jordan Beswick Sound Recordist…………………….……………………………..Antonio Arroyo Sound Mixer…………… …………………………………….…Dominick Tavella FORTY SHADES OF BLUE FORTY SHADES OF BLUE tells the story of Laura, a young Russian woman living in Memphis with a much older rock n’ roll legend, and the personal awakening she experiences in the wake of her unfortunate affair with his estranged son. Alan James is a legend in Memphis, a white man who produced black music back in the 60’s and 70’s, the heyday of Memphis Soul. Now in his later years, he’s still living the high life in a comfortable house in the right part of town. Alan lives with his girlfriend, Laura, a Russian beauty he met on tour in Moscow. Laura spends most of her time alone or raising their three-year- old son, Sam. A stranger in Memphis, she lives an easy, alienated life, Alan also has a grown son, Michael, with whom he has a complicated relationship fueled by jealousy, disappointment and anger. When Michael returns home for the first time in many years, the initial hostility he radiates towards his father's "girl" develops into something much more, and a messy, dangerous affair ensues. In the bars and bedrooms of this very contemporary city, a love triangle forms, illuminating the hearts and souls of these three tangled lives. Starring veteran actor Rip Torn as Alan, Darren Burrows as Michael, and Dina Korzun as Laura, the woman caught between them, FORTY SHADES OF BLUE was shot on location in Memphis, Tennessee – the hometown of director/co-writer Ira Sachs – and where he made The Delta, his first feature film. Screened at the Sundance and Toronto festivals, The Delta was distributed in the US by Strand Releasing. Rip Torn’s magnetic performance in FORTY SHADES OF BLUE is a return to the kind of lead roles he was known for in the 70s, in films like Payday, The Man Who Fell to Earth, and the seminal Coming Apart. For Dina Korzun, it’s her first role in an American film, a stunning follow up to her award winning performance in Pawel Pawlikowski’s Last Resort. The Producers of FORTY SHADES OF BLUE are Margot Bridger (The Delta, Jesus’ Son, Sidewalks of New York), Donald Rosenfeld (Howard’s End, Remains of the Day), Jawal Nga (The Clearing), Mary Bing and Sachs. The film was developed and produced in association with Mirage Enterprises. Executive Producers are Geoff Stier (Up at the Villa, Polish Wedding) and Diane Von Furstenberg, whose clothes are worn by Korzun throughout the film. ABOUT THE PRODUCTION Set in the world of Memphis music, FORTY SHADES OF BLUE confronts many of the issues that have been central to director Ira Sachs’ work in the past. As in his first feature The Delta (1997) -- in which a half-black, half-Vietnamese gay man living in Memphis was at the center of the story - - Sachs continues to be interested in people who exist both inside and outside of their own environment. In FORTY SHADES OF BLUE, however, it is the rumbling beneath his protagonist’s layered surface that drives the story more than in Sachs’s previous work. By conveying Laura’s depth through cinema, Sachs challenges the audience's easy dismissal of this woman whose only power seems, on the surface, to be in her looks. Instead, he asks the viewer to look deeper, and think of both the challenges and the circumstances that make Laura a heroine in the classic fashion. “From its inception,” Sachs said recently, “my intent was to turn the camera towards a character that often gets overlooked: a woman on the arm of a powerful man, who usually stays on the periphery.” By steadily focusing on one woman’s troubled awakening, Sachs shapes FORTY SHADES OF BLUE in the style of a novel by Henry James or Edith Wharton. Inspired by films like Belle de Jour, Contempt, and Satyajit Ray’s Charulata, Sachs’s strong visual style, both in terms of design and in terms of camera, gives Laura a more iconic presence on screen. “The film is a chamber piece,” says Sachs, “in which we needed to chart each phase of Laura’s self-discovery with precision.” For Dina Korzun, the Russian actress who plays the main character in FORTY SHADES OF BLUE, Laura is “a woman who has illusions and wrong ideas about life, and this love story gives her a reason to wake up and start to ask questions.” Adds Korzun, “She is totally unlike me.” “I needed a great actor,” says Sachs of Korzun, “who could approach this very modern part as if it were as complicated a role as Nora in The Doll House. I saw that potential in Dina’s wonderful, naturalistic performance in Pawel Pawlikowski's film Last Resort, but it wasn’t until I met her in person, and saw her natural beauty and sharp intelligence, that I understood her true potential.” To create the character, Korzun looked for people who had some of Laura’s qualities and found three girlfriends who shared some of Laura’s traits. “I mixed them up and from that, I invented Laura,” she says. “When I got the script, I knew how to do this and knew what to do with her,” says Korzun. “Dina was immensely empathetic towards Laura and her predicament,” adds Sachs. “She understood the challenges, and the potential, of this part deeply, and I was constantly amazed on set by the boldness and bravery of her choices.” “It’s happy work,” Korzun said while making the film. “I don’t usually have such a nice contact with the director. Even at our first meeting in London, I was surprised by his trust. “It’s destiny, a miracle how this project happened. I don’t think for me this kind of a relationship with a director will happen again." The soundtrack for FORTY SHADES OF BLUE features the little known soul classics of legendary music producer Bert Russell Berns, the creator of such pop standards as “Twist and Shout” and “Down in the Valley.” Like Berns -- or any of the well known music producers from Memphis like Sam Phillips, Willie Mitchell, or Jim Dickinson -- the character of Alan James, as played by Rip Torn, is known primarily by people who love the music. “Musicians come to these small towns because they want to work with the legends,” says Sachs in discussing the European art rock band that’s recording with James in the movie. “They want a piece of that magic.” Sachs got a piece of magic – and a legend of his own – in Rip Torn, for whom he wrote the part of Alan James. The director compares Rip Torn to “a great Shakespearean actor, in that he has an amazing ability to find both the comic and the tragic in every beat of his performance. He’s also a man who has lived a long and full life, and is able to convey the depth of that experience in the most subtle ways. You feel the history in his eyes, in his intonation, and in the rich emotions he’s able to convey.” The Memphis location and the music aspect of the character is part of what attracted Rip Torn to the role. “Working on this film was a chance for me to come down to Memphis and be in the kind of place I grew up in,” Torn said in an interview during production. “I had an uncle and aunt who had a dance hall in Texas, I was deep into music. Like it says in the script, my own father came back from World War II and said to me, ‘You know that music you like, hillbilly music,

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