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ALL EYES ON
ALL EYES ON
How “Bob Le Flambeur” from the Fifties turned into Neil Jordan’s new Riviera-set caper thriller “Double Down”
M ade in 1955 before the New Wave began to
sweep over world cine- ma, Bob Le Flambeur is a rarely-seen gem of French filmmaking. About a world-weary
gambler in Paris, writer-director Jean- Pierre Melville’s caper thriller also tips its fedora to old American movies.
Producer Stephen Woolley recalls first seeing it some 17 years ago: “I went to a screening at the French Institute and I loved its gossamer-like simplicity.
“At the time we were making Mona Lisa with Bob Hoskins and it immediately struck me that it would transfer very well to London. I could picture him as Bob the gambler, sur- rounded by rogues and henchmen played by up-and-coming actors of the eighties like Gary Oldman and Tim Roth. However I was unable to acquire the rights from Melville’s estate.
More than a decade later, fate intervened. Regular tandem Woolley and writer-director Neil Jordan were working with Warner Brothers on Michael Collins. The company were keen to collaborate again and asked if they had any suitable projects.
Jordan recalled Bob Le Flambeur and it transpired that Warner Bros had just brought the rights from Canal Plus. So Jordan developed the script in conjunction with John Wells at Warners and Woolley started prepar- ing the production.
But by the time they were ready to make the film, the company had changed management regimes, set up its own gambling-themed remake Ocean’s 11 and passed on the project “partly because of those conflicts,” said Woolley.
Now Bob is finally back on the screen in the updated guise of Nick Nolte’s charismatic rogue Bob Montagnet, gambler, thief and heroin addict. Inspired by Melville’s original, Jordan’s Double Down co-stars Tcheky Karyo, Gerard Darmon, Said Taghmaoui, Marc Lavoine and teenag- er Nutsa Kukhianidze as well as film- maker twins Mark and Mike Polish and Serbian director Emir Kusturica in act- ing roles. Ralph Fiennes also puts in a cameo appearance.
While the character of Bob is loosely based on Melville’s anti- hero, there was clearly plenty of scope for developing and updating the original story.
Making his 13th film – and 11th with Woolley – Jordan said: “I began working on the script with a bit of circumspection because I like the original movie a lot and I wasn’t sure that I wanted to do something that wasaremakeofit.Iputitonthe back-burner for a long time, thinking it would only be worth it if I could find an angle on the original as inge- nious as Bob’s scam.
“Then I read an article in Vanity Fair on the Bellagio Casino in Las Vegas and its collection of Picassos designed to bring the gambling experi- ence upmarket to aestheticise it in some mysterious way. And I remember another article I had read about the various Impressionist masterpieces brought by Japanese corporations which were kept secure in tempera- ture-controlled vaults, with perfect copies of the originals on display in the boardrooms.
“And the idea came from this of two robberies, one a cover for the
other, and a casino, refurbished by a Japanese bank using as its main attraction the art it had bought at extravagant prices in the eighties: per- fect copies on the walls, the originals in a vault nearby.
“The idea of an original and a copy had obvious appeal since it was in fact my commissioned task to make some kind of a copy of an original. The thought of two robberies, one apparent and one real, had an even greater appeal since I could leave the plot of the original movie intact, as a kind of decoy to the real plot, the real robbery.
Woolley explained the reason for Jordan’s decision to switch the action from Melville’s Paris (and Deauville’s casino) to the Cote d’Azur: “Paris has changed a lot since the fifties. Many of Bob’s haunts are now tourist attrac- tions. Montmartre and all those places that were seedy, weird and full of Genet characters in the fifties and six- ties don’t really exist any more.
“Neil was bringing the story right up to date and he felt that the contrast between the shifty, shady underworld of Nice and the gaudy opulence of Monte Carlo was much more striking.”
In many ways, added Jordan, “the story could be set in any casino-dri- ven city. Tijuana, Atlantic City, Las Vegas... However the attraction of Nice was not just the proximity to Monte Carlo but the fact that Bob’s character, the crumpled American gambler abroad, is plausible in a way that he wouldn’t be in say, Dublin or London, as so many Americans have made the Riviera their home.”
Also renewing their working relationship with Jordan are cine- matographer Chris Menges, who lit
the director’s first feature Angel as well as Michael Collins, and produc- tion designer Anthony Pratt, whose most recent collaboration was The End Of The Affair.
One of the major lighting and design challenges was the Riviera Casino, “full of fake glamour, serious money – and a lot of bad plastic
Photos main: Neil Jordan and Stephen Woolley with Nick Nolte, the star of Double Down; opposite page: Neil Jordan and Chris Menges; crew and cast on location in the French Riviera
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