Starring: Jason Patric Isabella Rossellini Udo Kier Brooke Palsson David Wontner Louis Negin Kevin Mcdonald
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A MONTEREY MEDIA PRESENTATION STARRING: JASON PATRIC ISABELLA ROSSELLINI UDO KIER BROOKE PALSSON DAVID WONTNER LOUIS NEGIN KEVIN MCDONALD Writer: George Toles and Guy MAddin Director: Guy MAddin Executive Producer: Phyllis Laing Producers: Jody Shapiro, Jean du Toit Director of Photography: Ben KAsulke Editor: John Gurdebeke Production Designer: Richardo Alms Casting by: Jim Heber Runtime: 93 Minutes © 2011 Cinema Atelier Tovar Ltd. MPAA RATING: R http://keyholemovie.com/ 2 Keyhole Production Notes “I’m only a ghost, but a ghost isn’t nothing.” Keyhole is a rousing 1930s gangster picture set in a haunted house. It is a ghost sonata in which dream and waking life are seamlessly blended to isolate and expose universal feelings. SYNOPSIS A gangster and deadbeat father, Ulysses Pick (Jason Patric), returns home after a long absence. He arrives, toting two teenagers: a drowned girl, Denny (Brooke Palsson), who has mysteriously returned to life; and a bound-and- gagged hostage, who is actually his own teenage son, Manners (David Wontner). Confused, Ulysses doesn't recognize his own son, but he feels with increasing conviction he must make an indoor odyssey from the back door of his home all the way up, one room at a time, to the marriage bedroom where his wife Hyacinth (Isabella Rossellini) awaits, full of cancer, grieving over the deaths of her three other children, and wooed by Ulysses' arch-rival, Chang (Johnny Chang). The house is haunted by countless dead relatives. As in Homer's Odyssey, Ulysses reaches his goal and vanquishes his enemy, but the equilibrium of the house has been disturbed. Manners seeks solace in the dream world where order can be restored, but he cannot sleep forever. He wakes, overwhelmed by reality which he cannot bear. The house, familiar even in its disheveled state, saves Manners and he returns to his mother. Perhaps this has all been a dream that is dreamt every night by Manners himself or by the ghosts he loves so much. DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT Keyhole is a domestic Odyssey across carpets and floor tiles instead of across the sea. Here, in the old family home, the film can poetically study the emotionally complex importance of the house, everyone’s house, and all the memories that haunt every nook and cranny of our childhood domiciles. The film is as much an autobiography of a house as anything else. Ultimately, by embedding the entire drama in the house to which all my fictional family’s memories are welded, I hope to divine the nature of the love we all have for our homes, and the love produced by our homes. These studies of the poetics of domestic space are contemplative themes, but the galloping narrative drive of the Odyssey enables me to employ a propulsive story. The gangsters-in-a-haunted-house genre, an admittedly rare, but not un-useful film niche – the Bowery Boys’ “Spooks Run Wild” comes to mind as an unlikely B-movie inspiration, one used by poet John Ashberry in his most recent collection of work -- has emerged as a most latently powerful device for transforming this meditative story into a most compellingly, hauntingly and universally true tale of domestic love and familial memory. - Guy Maddin Keyhole “Keyhole images (through the keyhole) is old school, melodramatic. I liked the idea of kneeling and looking through them.” --Guy Maddin Narrative without Autobiography Turning away from the autobiographical, or ‘cinematic rehab’ as he describes it, Maddin strikes out into pure narrative filmmaking with Keyhole. “Nakedly considering my previous films’ autobiographies allowed me access to story details that I never could have dreamt up on my own,” he reveals. “In a lot of cases, I had to bend real events and feelings to fit a story, but I learned what makes fictional scripts tick by approaching them with myself 3 at the centre. After three big films where I am the throbbing - and sometimes hideous - centre, I know enough now to go forward like other mature filmmakers and I feel comfortable now with regular story-telling.” Inspiration The 1958 book, The Poetics of Space, by French phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard fascinated Maddin. It is a classic study of the psychological affects of domestic space. “The author discusses in exquisitely delicious detail the meanings and feelings produced by the various nooks and crannies of a house, like a living room, a dining room, a closet, a laundry chute. It thrilled me to read.” “My original intent was to make a movie version of this book, but that would have been as impossible as making a film about a dictionary.” The solution was to take the deconstruction of the house and rebuild it around a durable story that was in the public domain. The architecture of that kind of narrative would allow for indulging in Bachelard’s reveries and still permit everyone to find their own way into the story. Maddin’s first choice was Heinrich von Kleist’s 1808 tragedy, Penthesilea, which is a battle of the sexes between the Trojans and the queen of the Amazons, but it veered too far from the domestic setting. Homer’s Odyssey, however, about a man returning to his home where his wife and son have stayed for 19 years in his absence, was much better. When he returns, Ulysses must arrive in disguise. As in the original, at the very centre of the home is the marital bed built on the top of a tree and the house is built around it. The sturdiest thing in this house is the marriage bed. On some levels it’s a deadbeat dad story, an abandoned wife story and also a jealous son story, almost a precursor of Hamlet. Maddin let his protagonist, Ulysses, wander through this house one room at a time, making an odyssey from the back door to his marital bed. Tapping into their emotion, Ulysses, his wife, Hyacinth, as well as Denny and Manners can walk the stairs and the halls, navigating with their eyes shut. “Along the way in the writing, both Blanchard’s work and Homer’s work faded into the background and it became a hybrid where neither of the source materials is recognizable. This was something that George Toles and I really liked,” he said. “Freud, however, has no place in this house.” Touchstones Guy Maddin does not go gently into elementary narrative. He was encouraged by Carl-Theodor Dreyer's early masterpiece Vampyr, which was at the forefront of the fantasy horror genre. Abstract and poetic, it was impressionistic in atmosphere rather than design. “It involves dreamy wandering and attaches itself to feelings both unsettling and comforting.” And Maddin was energized by the breathless discombobulation Martin Arnold inflicts upon his viewers of long ago shot footage of Mickey Rooney and Gregory Peck. “Arnold’s films point out surprising facts of every conventionally-told narrative. There is a secret mini-meta narrative if you give the words enough breathing room.” Cinematography Keyhole is shot in black and white because in a Guy Maddin film, nothing ever is. It is also his first entirely digital film. Director of Photography Ben Kasulke (Brand Upon the Brain) and Maddin were both camera operators. With the exception of Twilight of the Ice Nymphs, Maddin has always had some hands-on involvement in the actual 4 shooting of all his films. “The Canon 5D cameras are the size of Dustbusters, so Ben and I would enter the room like a pair of MollyMaids, sucking up the imagery.” The exceptional detail which the 5D camera offered allowed Maddin to maintain the signature look of his previous films, but provoked a volte-face in strategy. “I used to disguise sets with the mists and grains of small gauge emulsions, like Super 8 or 16.” Now, he is embracing detail, showing as much as possible with 35mm. Essentially, Maddin has been seduced by technology, trading in his ‘vats of Vaseline’ from the Saddest Music days for not only detail, but in his next film, colour. Casting Keyhole shimmers. At first blush, this is a performance-driven film rather than a balance between performance and atmosphere, but Maddin has created a number of thresholds for Ulysses to cross into his domestic odyssey and atmosphere is always present. The House Having previously indulged in the “illicit world of silent film,” Maddin enjoyed the irony of sculpting his story with fewer words and greater silences. It also allowed the house to speak, literally. “Household sounds are important,” he said. “I wanted the film to have the logic of music. The house does hum. Song fragments drift up through heating vents. I want the score to be as comforting as the house when it settles in for the night.” Ulysses Ulysses Pick. Odysseus was the first alpha male. Not only is he physically strong, but he’s also wily. Yet also, a deadbeat dad, an absentee father. This kind of family dynamic is older than the spoken word, Maddin felt. “Such fathers haunt the people they leave behind. They fill the house with their false presence.” “I cast Jason Patric because I wanted a protagonist in almost the Hollywood sense of the word who makes things happen and can take the whole script and carry it on his back. Jason is a guy you could harness the story to and let him haul it across the finish line. Maddin had met Jason Patric at Ebert Fest in 2005 and pursued him for years. Ulysses Pick was written for him. “Jason has combustible energy, latent power. He is a dramatic problem solver.” And he allowed Maddin to rediscover the awe of beautiful voices and dialogue.