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YOU KILL ME
STARRING Ben Kingsley, Téa Leoni, Luke Wilson and Phillip Barker Hall
DIRECTED BY John Dahl
Opens July 20
Globe Cinema
Most Hollywood directors love the opportunity to work on big-budget films with big-budget sets and big-budget actors, but for director John Dahl, the opportunity to work on a film with a shoe-string budget is equally tantalizing. Best known for his noir-style crime dramas like Red Rock West and The Last Seduction, Dahl is finally returning to the hard-boiled filmmaking of his past with the darkly comic You Kill Me.
"With less money there is less time," Dahl says, "but there is more artistic and creative freedom, which is very satisfying."
You Kill Me follows Frank Falenczyk (Ben Kingsley), a hit man for the Polish mob, whose drinking is really getting in the way of his work. When he passes out and misses a hit on a rival boss, his employer (Phillip Baker Hall) sends him to San Francisco to dry out. He gets a job at a mortuary, gets a sponsor at AA (Luke Wilson), meets a girl (Téa Leoni) and starts on the road to recovery so he can finally get back to what makes him feel whole again – killing people.
Tackling a subject that Hollywood has been fascinated with of late – the emotionally damaged hit man – writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely (The Chronicles of Narnia) have created a script that gets at the emotions of the subject while mixing in dry, sharp black humour. According to Dahl, the lack of finger-pointing is part of what attracted him to the script.
"What I liked about it is, he starts out as kind of a repulsive guy, but ultimately he puts his past behind him and moves forwards," says Dahl. "The movie takes your notions of what is right and wrong and good and fair and sort of puts them on the edge."
Dahl also had the opportunity to direct some of Hollywood’s most respected actors, including the incomparable Kingsley as the bottle-happy, fire-power-loving Frank. And though Kingsley was a huge draw for Dahl when he first got the script, it was the perfect balance of script and actor that convinced him to do the project.
"A lot of times you will get a script where there is an actor attached to it, and the script may not necessarily be that good. In this case it was a great script and a great part for Ben Kingsley," he says.
Working with supporting actors such as Bill Pullman and Dennis Farina could be an ego nightmare for some directors to deal with. Not so, says Dahl, who attributes You Kill Me’s creative and peaceful working environment to the lack of money.
"There wasn’t a whole lot of money, so everyone went into it knowing that if you are here doing this movie it is because you just want to do this film," Dahl explains. "I don’t know when I have worked where there was more fun and generosity and fewer egos. It was a really fun creative environment."
The location itself helped that creative edge. Shooting during a balmy Winnipeg winter, Dahl says Canada’s perogy belt is an environment he is much more comfortable working in than the sometimes uptight world of L.A.
"Canadians are just so friendly and polite and courteous. Nobody has got an agenda. I come from Montana, so to me, Winnipeg is like the big city." |
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