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Wednesday, Sept. 4, 2013
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This publicity image released by Toronto International Film Festival shows, Jake Gyllenhaal, left, and Hugh Jackman in ‘Prisoners,’ a film being showcased at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Director raves about U.S. experience By THE CANADIAN PRESS
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TORONTO — Making the leap to Hollywood with the Hugh Jackman-led thriller Prisoners has Quebec director Denis Villeneuve feeling “a bit addicted” to U.S. projects these days. The Oscar-nominated filmmaker says he’s “very United States-oriented” after helming his first big-budget studio project, which chronicles a father’s desperate search for his missing daughter. He gushes over working with Jackman and co-star Jake Gyllenhaal, who also stars in Villeneuve’s Toronto-set psychological thriller, Enemy. Both films will screen at the Toronto International Denis Villeneuve Film Festival, which begins Thursday. Prisoners got an early preview at the Telluride Film Festival over the Labour Day weekend, and early reviews are rapturous. Villeneuve says the enthusiastic response has thrown him into a sense of “euphoria.” “When you make a movie, it’s always flirting with disaster,” Villeneuve said Tuesday from Montreal. “You never know. A movie exists when it’s seen by an audience, you never know at the end of the day, it’s like a wish, a dream, but you don’t know if they will share the dream.” Villeneuve says he’s become close friends with Gyllenhaal as well as Prisoners cinematographer Roger Deakins (Skyfall, True Grit, The Reader, No Country for Old Men) and the film’s editors Joel Cox
(Million Dollar Baby, Unforgiven, Mystic River) and Gary Roach (J. Edgar, Changeling, Letters from Iwo Jima). “It was the most beautiful cinematographic experience of my life,” raves Villeneuve, who called Deakins one of his biggest heroes. “I had the chance to work with people that were so over-talented, it’s like too much. It’s like a massive drug and I don’t know if I’m a bit addicted right now.” The Hollywood Reporter enthused over “a wellmade and immensely gripping film,” while Variety called Prisoners “a spellbinding, sensationally effective thriller” that marks “a grand-slam English-lingo debut for the gifted Quebecois director Denis Villeneuve.” Despite horror stories of the studio system squashing an auteur’s vision, Villeneuve says he felt no pressure to alter his approach to Prisoners, which costars Gyllenhaal as a detective and Paul Dano as the prime suspect. “That was a big surprise. Because going there I was ready for anything and at the end of the day I did my movie. If people don’t like Prisoners it’s because of me,” he says, noting it helped having a dream team behind him. “Where I was wise was I think that I chose strong partnerships. When you work with Roger Deakins, this man is so respected in Hollywood, you know, and Joel Cox as well . . . . It was like I had a creative film crew that was a bit bulletproof.” Before tackling Prisoners, Villeneuve dove into the Canada-Spain co-production, Enemy, an adaptation of the Jose Saramago novel, The Double. The film traces the increasing paranoia of a uni-
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No love between Rousy, Tate on set of Season 18
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Ronda Rousey, top, punches Liz Carmouche during their UFC 157 women’s bantamweight championship mixed martial arts match in Anaheim, Calif., Feb. 23, 2013. Dr. Kannan Veerappan (DDS)
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After 17 seasons, three foreign spinoffs and 32 male coaches, The Ultimate Fighter is showing off its feminine side. In Season 18, which debuts Wednesday, UFC women’s bantamweight champion (Rowdy) Ronda Rousey and No. 3 contender Miesha (Cupcake) Tate square off as coaches in charge of male and female bantamweights (135-pounders). Rousey and Tate will square off after the reality TV series at UFC 168 on Dec. 29 in Las Vegas. The show thrives on bad blood between the coaches. And these two women fit the bill. “It’s just what you would expect: Two women that can’t stand each other that are very competitive, you just want to strangle each other,” Tate said with a laugh. “I think that’s pretty typical.” Other than a previous cameo by Rousey as a guest coach, the show has been exclusively a male domain. That changes with Season 18. UFC president Dana White, as usual, expects the best. “It’s going to be a great season,” he said. “I know what goes on during the fights but I don’t see the reality (side) or anything of that unless something bad happens and then I get involved. It’s a great season.” There is plenty of Canadian content among the 32 finalists. Valerie Letourneau (4-3) of Montreal, Jessica Rakoczy (1-3) of Hamilton, and Sarah Moras (3-1) of Kelowna, B.C., carry the Canadian flag among the women while the men include Louis Fisette (6-1) of Winnipeg and Josh Hill (9-0) of Hamilton. But as in recent past series, the fighters have to win a qualification fight on Episode 1, titled History in the Making, to make the final cast of 16. Bantamweights were most recently featured on Season 14.
versity lecturer, played by Gyllenhaal, who believes he’s found his exact doppelganger. Villeneuve admits to being especially nervous about how that smaller, more experimental project will be received, noting it’s “a very challenging movie.” “For me, it’s a movie experience. It was a laboratory that I did with Jake Gyllenhaal,” he says. “When the audience will (sit) in the theatre to see Enemy, they have to know that I want to play with them. It’s really like a game . . . . It’s a movie that requires a lot of attention and the will to participate.” Villeneuve credits that experimentation with helping him prepare for Prisoners, also an intense examination of humanity’s darker tendencies. “Thematically, both movies are puzzles and both movies, more importantly, deal with inner fears and the dark side of a human soul,” he says. “One of the questions (they are) asking is: who is really in control inside yourself?” To a certain degree, such weighty fare is welltread territory for the 45-year-old director. Lauded by some as Canada’s next Denys Arcand, Villeneuve has established himself as a master at lyrical, haunting visions such as his black-and-white rendering of the 1989 Montreal Massacre in 2009’s Polytechnique and intense, slow-burning dramas like his 2010 Oscar-nominated Incendies. Friend and fellow filmmaker Niv Fichman credits Villeneuve with having an ability to mine deep themes from seemingly simple stories. “He’s so intuitive, he’s the most intuitive director I’ve every worked with,” says Fichman, who produced Enemy. “He often doesn’t know where he’s going necessarily, he just kind of goes and certain things happen.” The Toronto International Film Festival opens Thursday.