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September 27, 2005
Bullet time: Andrew Niccol on Lord of War (2005) ** 1/2
THERE ARE EXPLAINERS, THERE ARE LOCATORS, and there are the paranoid. Explainers want you to know how any process they’ve mastered goes its merry ways; locators can be overheard on any street corner identifying the street corner to whomever they’re on their cell phone with; and the paranoid? They want you to know why the world is after them.
Lord of War, Andrew Niccol’s odd, relentless, hilarious, scathing, idiosyncratic third feature as a director—he wrote The Truman Show before writing and directing the luxuriously glum Gattaca and the glumly luxurious S1m0ne, and wrote an early draft of what became Steven Spielberg’s The Terminal—we are placed inside the head of an international arms dealer, one working outside the confines of treaties and international agreements, and we never leave. He’s an explainer, a locator and decisively a paranoid and he cheerfully narrates his bloody way across several continents.
Nicolas Cage is a jaunty, even inspired choice to play Yuri Orlov, a Ukrainian émigré who lives any number of American dreams. Once in Brighton Beach before the fall of the Berlin Wall, his parents open a kosher deli, pretending to be Jewish. Amid the dealings of the Russian mafia, Yuri becomes convinced he can become an arms dealer, enlists his brother, Vitaly (Jared Leto). After about ten or fifteen minutes, you realize you’re in for an unusual ride: Yuri’s clever, cadenced, witty, mad voiceover does not cease. (Niccol’s cleverness, both verbally and visually, is apparent from the credit sequence, which traces the trajectory of a bullet through its manufacture into the forehead of an African boy, over which his own name is imposed.) Drawn from scads of research, Yuri’s Wile E. Coyote adventures (countered by Roadrunner and Interpol agent Ethan Hawke), shot for a below-the-line cost of $15 million, become a black-as-Kubrick disquisition on contemporary foreign affairs.
To make the film, obtaining thousands of actual Kalashnikov machineguns, arraying dozens of tanks in the Czech Republic. Niccol in fact became an arms dealer. Before that, his only encounters were “on a farm when I was a kid in New Zealand. But it was just killing possums, the sort of rodent of the day. But it’s not a gun culture by any means. I don’t like guns. I’ve had four films and I’ve never had a gun in them. Which is almost a crime in Hollywood. I’ve never had an armourer, these guys who supply the weapons for movies. This guy shows up and here’s this virgin and I’m giving him the biggest assignment of his life!” Niccol laughs.
The affable director considers himself as much a researcher than a writer. He collates and collages and compiles. In 1997, when Gattaca was released, the former commercials director—“Now my job is to make movies longer than sixty seconds”—told me he compiled "notebooks this high. He counted on research, locations and production design to invent the world for his genetic parable. Anything that seems timeless in design, “I would drag that kicking and screaming into the future with me. I didn’t have any money then and it wasn’t commonplace to do all the kinds of removals you can today to embellish a location.”
Niccol has a more lateral research method today: “I had a 50-foot long table. Which you may think is excessive! But I make it out of doors, it’s made of doors, the way you can make a cheap, very long table is to make them out of hollow doors. I lay out all of the images for the film; I collect them as I write. It always starts as something I do when I write. I don’t… I don’t even think of it as writing. I’m just prepping. I’m getting images… it starts abstract and gets more and more representational as I get closer to production. There was a long table and I took [Nicolas Cage] through all these images and at the end there was this real replica of an AK-47. I just asked, ‘You want to do the film?’ I like to think it was the presentation beforehand that clinched the deal, but it also was a bit of theater.”
At a Q&A I’d moderated the night before, a very serious young academic had tried “Lord of War” and found it guilty of art, its facets and factors not congealing in some sort of flat-out statement. “Everyone’s entitled their own opinion. I was a little confused, I suppose. He was so focused on racism and sexism when the lead character is actually causing death!” Niccol giggles. “Everywhere he goes! I’m not sure that those slights are anywhere near compare to what his main mission is. There’s nothing that’s not factual. It’s the truth. If the truth is political, then it’s a political film. But the truth shouldn’t be political.”
Posted by pride at September 27, 2005 05:39 PM
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