GERMANY: Steve Buscemi's 'Interview', a remake of assassinated Dutch film maker Theo Van Gogh's 2003 film starring Sienna Miller screens at the Berlin Film Festival

Director and actor Steve Buscemi, in Germany to present his latest film 'Interview' at the Berlin Film Festival, said he was overwhelmed by the attention his leading lady Sienna Miller got from the media while they worked on the movie. In the film, Buscemi himself plays a reporter who is assigned to interview sexy starlet Katya (Miller), but the actor-turned-director said it was not until he worked with Miller that he came to understand the amount of interest the media has in the young actress. "I think it's pretty insane what she goes through," Buscemi told Reuters in an interview just a few hours after landing in Berlin. "We were rehearsing in London for a week and I was just shocked when we would come out of the rehearsal space and there would be all these paparazzi and then we'd get in the car and they would get in the car and they would follow us and we would have little chase scenes. And the cab driver that we had, didn't even know who she was, you know, it was like 'someone is following us' and he would start taking off and so, yeah, it's a little overwhelming," he said. 'Interview', screening in the Panorama section at the Berlin Film Festival, is a remake of the 2003 Dutch film of the same title by assassinated, controversial film maker Theo Van Gogh. Buscemi said Van Gogh had sought out to remake three of his Dutch films in America before his death, a task his producers Bruce Weiss and Gijs van de Westelaken wanted to fulfil after the director was killed by an Islamist militant in 2004. "It's, you know, this is what he wanted to do himself. Specifically these three films he thought would work as American films. They are just really good performance pieces and it was certainly fun to act in and I'm looking forward to seeing the other two get made," Buscemi said. 'Interview' is the first in the trilogy, with 'Blind Date', directed by another actor-turned-director Stanley Tucci currently in production and Bob Balaban announced as the director for '06'. In the film frustrated reporter Pierre Peters, who believes he should be in Washington covering a breaking news story, is given the task of interviewing TV soap and trashy horror film star Katya at a New York restaurant. The sexy blonde keeps the reporter waiting for over an hour before turning up for the interview. But Peters does not impress her either with his lack of journalistic skills. The interview falls short as the offended Katya walks out of the restaurant. However, Peters gets a second chance when his taxi driver crashes after being distracted by spotting Katya walking in the street, leaving the reporter slightly injured. Katya takes Peters back to her swanky SoHo lofthouse, and an odd night of talking, arguing and kissing leads the two to swap their darkest secrets. Buscemi admitted that directing himself was the "nutty" part of making the film, but added that the part of Pierre Peters was simply too good to give away. With very few actors besides himself and Miller to direct, Buscemi said he did not consider acting and directing simultaneously too hard a task. "You know, I thought, maybe I can do this. The only thing I think maybe sometimes I may have short-changed Sienna because I was in it so much, it was hard to then step back and just look at her performance. But she didn't need much help anyway because she does such a wonderful job," he said. Buscemi also said the verbal dual between Katya and Peters was largely scripted and flying insults between the two characters were not the product of heated improv. "It was very scripted, I mean, we had the writer David Schecter do a first draft, couple of drafts and then I got in there two and worked with him and worked alone. But in the rehearsal process, what I told Sienna was 'look, if something comes up and it feels right, then we should go for it' because I just think that the nature of the way we did it lent itself to some improvisation even though everything was, we worked with a pretty solid script but I mean there were moments, I think Sienna has a line, she says to me, I say, 'Well, I have to write something' when she gets a phone call and she says: 'well, make it up, everybody else does' and that was her line, that was something that I think she spoke from experience," he said. Miller, whose private life has earned her more headlines than her work on the big screen, has received some of the best reviews for her performance in the film. Screen International called this Miller's "Breakthrough performance".

ITN Source | February 13, 2007

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