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Watching the Detectives clips! + Soter on Cillian + new affiliates
24 April 2007 at 11:56 PM | by Melty_Girl
Detectives video clips on ComingSoon.net
Exciting news: now you can get a first look at Watching the Detectives, thanks to ComingSoon.net, where you'll find three clips from the film!
Clip #1 is meet-cute, clip #2 is flirt-cute, clip #3 is meet-the-friends-cute. I'm liking Cillian in geek mode, hands on hips, grimacing through his smiles. Very curious to know why Cillian's character Neil is wearing an old-fashioned striped prison uniform in clip #1. What film is this video store clerk referencing, I wonder...
Clip #3 answers a few questions for us Cillian obsessives. Last summer, U.K. tabloid The Mirror "reported" that the photos of Lucy Liu spraying Cillian's mouth with a shot of breath freshener captured Lucy publicly demonstrating that she was offended by his bad breath. Seemed more likely to me that this was merely the two actors in character shooting a scene, and my hunch has now been confirmed. This scene also tells us that the baby that Cillian, Lucy, Callie Thorne, and Michael Yurchak were photographed with last summer is a character in the movie (Thorne and Yurchak's child), and therefore is probably not Cillian's son Malachy.
Soter: "...turns out that he's a lot like the character"
Yurchak, ?, Liu, Murphy, Thorne
Also from ComingSoon.net, a candid interview with Detectives director Paul Soter. When asked about casting Cillian against type as a video store film geek, Soter commented,
"At first, I had a slight hesitation, because I think of him not only being a gorgeous guy, but anything that I've seen him, he was incredibly self-possessed. There's something about the character that's just slightly goofy, and can be awkward at times. ... When I met him, ...he was so much more like the way I envisioned the Neil character, just in his own personality, the way he carries himself. He's an incredibly regular guy and having seen him on screen, it was a really fascinating thing to see, because he's very soft-spoken, got a great sly sense of humor that's kind of quiet and clever. Just the way he carries himself, I thought he looked like I always visualized this character, and it just turns out that he's a lot like the character, very regular, sweet and very goofy fellow. I think there can have been a temptation to make him more awkward, but I didn't want him to be a caricature of a film nerd. I know plenty of guys in my life who are long-time grad school guys or seriously into movies and music, but they play basketball, they go out on dates, they play in bands. I've always known a lot of guys like that and that to me, Neil was supposed to be like that. Instead of him being a classic dork, the hook was more that this guy has always fantasized about living his life like a movie but nobody has ever said to him, 'Alright, well do it.'"
About Cillian "not being known for his comedy," Soter agreed that Cillian's character is the straight man, but said that Cillian is versatile enough to play a more broadly comic character.
"The comedy that Cillian does in the movie, his character, is more reactive. It's basically that it's a guy responding to a lot of weird sh*t (sic) happening to him, so I certainly wanted him to have comedy elements, but in terms of being the generator and being the driving force of the comedy, that was Lucy's part. It's a guy who thinks he's kind of funny, and he's funny, but not quite as funny as he thinks he is, and it's watching a guy like that react to a lot of crazy sh*t (sic). I wasn't asking him to... do a lot of heavy-lifting comedy-wise but he's an incredibly funny guy. I think he would be capable of doing that in another movie. He's very smart. He has a great sense of humor and he's very expressive."
When asked about Cillian and Lucy's participation in creating the characters, Soter heaped praise on his leads:
"Because of the scheduling and ...visa issues with Cillian, we didn't have as much rehearsal time as I had hoped for, so I really tried to spend a lot of times on the phone with each of those guys. You can't really rehearse until you end up going through the scenes and talking about them and you bounce ideas off each other. I think I was able to have that give and take with them, and as actors, they enjoyed that. They don't just want to be told, 'Okay, here's your dialogue. Go stand over here.' I think it ended up being collaborative. I really lucked out ...because they're both really cool. I knew they were going to be funny and right for the part, but you know, with Broken Lizard movies, ...I'm working with my guys and you know everybody is going to be cool, ... nobody's going to disrupt the set. I was like, 'I'm going to have two people I don't know who really are big stars, and I'm just keeping my fingers crossed that they're cool.' I couldn't have been luckier because these were tough conditions. We were shooting a movie in 22 days, we're trying to do six pages, sometimes seven pages a day, it's New York summer, it's hot as sh*t (sic), we're doing stuff in closed little rooms that are sweaty and disgusting, and there just wasn't a single moment where they weren't happy to be there, happy to help, do whatever they can to help. I didn't get a complaint out of either of them. They were nice to every single person on set. What ended up being cool is that we were so frantic about shooting everything that they didn't have time to go back to their trailers, sit around for 45 minutes and get bored. They stayed on the set, so they got very wrapped up in the energy of the shoot. It was just a pleasure top to bottom."
New site affiliates
Veeeery pleased to meet you, James-McAvoy.net and AwesomeBale.org. Yummy.
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