Production
David Bowie was hired for the role of Jack Celliers after director Nagisa Oshima saw Bowie in a production of The Elephant Man on Broadway, saying Bowie had "an inner spirit that is indestructible." While shooting the movie, Bowie was amazed that Oshima had a two- to three-acre camp built on the remote Polynesian island of Rarotonga, but most of the camp was never shot on film. He said Oshima "only shot little bits at the corners. I kind of thought it was a waste, but when I saw the movie, it was just so potent - you could feel the camp there, quite definitely." Bowie noted how Oshima would give an incredible amount of direction to his Japanese actors ("down to the minutest detail"), but when directing him or fellow Westerner Tom Conti, he would say "Please do whatever it is you people do." Bowie thought his performance in the movie was "the most credible performance" he'd done in a film up to that point in his career.
Contrary to usual cinematic practice, Oshima shot the film without rushes and shipped the film off the island with no safety prints. "It was all going out of the camera and down to the post office and being wrapped up in brown paper and sent off to Japan," Bowie stated. Oshima's editor in Japan cut the movie into a rough print within four days of Oshima returning to Japan.
Read more about this topic: Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence
Famous quotes containing the word production:
“The repossession by women of our bodies will bring far more essential change to human society than the seizing of the means of production by workers.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“From the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
—Charles Darwin (1809–1882)
“The heart of man ever finds a constant succession of passions, so that the destroying and pulling down of one proves generally to be nothing else but the production and the setting up of another.”
—François, Duc De La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680)