What’s going on with Werner Herzog’s “Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans”?
Last we heard, Herzog was still talking it up calling it a possible “new form of film noir,” but the picture still had no official U.S. distribution.
Herzog’s already moved on to his next film, a lo-fi horror that David Lynch is producing called, “My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done,” so presumably (optimistically?), this means ‘Lieutenant’ is completed and edited and just needs to find a studio that wants to put it out.
The film’s star Nicolas Cage has been doing press and promotion for the disaster-porn pic, “Knowing,” but no one has seemingly used it as an opportunity to ask about ‘Lieutenant.’ However, the IndieLondon has and while the do not shed any new light on when we’ll see the film in theaters, they did get some interesting news out of him that no one’s heard before. Speficially the fact that both Cage and Herzog see the film has having franchise potential.
“One of the things that Werner came out with was he felt that the movie would be kind of like a franchise, in that you could have more than one Bad Lieutenant; that this movie is not a remake, it’s Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. You could have Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call London next. It could happen and that’s what makes it interesting. I’m not the same cop that Harvey [Keitel] was. I’m a different cop. I’m a New Orleans cop.”
Cage says part of the reason he signed to the film (that’s not a remake obviously), is because the idea was “so audacious I couldn’t resist.” He also goes on to describe just how the two films are vastly different.
“Bad Lieutenant, in my opinion, really was still very much in a Judea-Christian programme. I liked it. But Werner’s Bad Lieutenant goes more into the existential point of view.”
The film also co-stars Xzibit, Eva Mendes and Val Kilmer. So “Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans”… sometime in 2009? May we suggest August? Werner? Bueller? Anyone??