“When you look at America at this time, in a way it felt right: do the darkest film imaginable,” Werner Herzog says about his decision to make “Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans” in this EPK, a picture he has called repeatedly a new form of film noir.
“I’m someone who has no idea what drugs do to you,” he said regarding the film’s excessive drug use. “So I had to ask the writer and more competent people, ‘what does it do to you?’ So I had to be advised. In a way I don’t really care that much.”
He adds that he’s not the biggest cinemagoer in the world either and sounds positively naive, which is odd, but Herzog for you. “I’ve never seen a film with excessive use of drugs, I do not see that many films,” he said straight-faced (you know he’s probably telling the truth too).
But man, the editing in this EPK, which Jeff Wells also bitched about, is horrible, and it really tests your patience sitting through the whole thing.
We’ve also found some newer shots from the film that include, on top of stars Nicolas Cage and Eva Mendes, Val Kilmer and Xzibit (Fairuza Bulk and Jennifer Coolidge also co-star).
Like “ecstatic truth,” Herzog is always making up terms to fit his films and for ‘Lieutenant’ the new colloquialism seems to be the “bliss of evil.” Does Herzog spoil the film (careful now) when he says, “I don’t care about this kind of definition, who is ‘good,’ who is ‘bad.’ Actually, his real evil, his real bad behavior solves an almost unsolvable case. He gets a result. He brings the murderers to justice, but he does it in very unusual ways.” ? Does this thing even need a plot? Just yell, “action” and watch Nic Cage go nuts, right? It probably matters little if that actually is a spoiler.
Man, this thing is hard to watch. We bailed after 4:00 minutes and we challenge you to watch it all in one sitting (if you do let us know if anything else was said, but it’s 16 minutes in total and slow as molasses, so good luck!). “Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call New Orleans” still has no U.S. (or even international) distribution, but that may change after it plays the Venice and Toronto Film Festivals this fall.
Update: Anyone find it curiously odd that this EPK has been up for a few days and then once we write about it and its potential spoilers it’s all of a sudden pulled down? Hmmm, smells like we were on the money.
