Saturday, March 04, 2006

The Return of Abel Ferrara

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(image via temacom)

As we duly recover from our mammoth hangover (sorry about the lack of preamble for taking yesterday off), good to know that New York indie icon Abel Ferrara is on the rebound. It's been a while. According to David Hershkovits at the PaperBlog:

"After two years living and working in Italy, one of the film world's most un-Hollywood directors with a past that sometimes mirrors the violent movies he makes (like The King of New York and The Bad Lieutenant) is in LA casting his new movie. We've met in the past so when I saw him in the lobby of the Standard Hotel, I stopped to say hello.

"Talking a mile-a-minute and obviously very excited about his new project ... I know Ferrara doesn't have a great reputation in some quarters but his intensity, focus and apparent love of his script is something to behold. With no apparent role in the process, he invited me to sit in on the meeting, thus giving me a bird's eye view of a director at work. The movie is meant to be a prequel to King of New York, set in the days of Studio 54 and based on a true story of a gang of kids from Brooklyn who are on the verge of either turning into lifetime hoodlums or moving in another direction. The actress -- who, by the way, turned out to be Thora Burch -- handled herself extremely well. She knew the script inside out and wasn't too intimidated by the wild-eyed director (though I did notice that she lifted her eyebrows every now and then)."

The full, unexpurgated blog post here.

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