Hoping like us to see Werner Herzog’s “Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans,” sometime this year, perhaps some time this summer (where it seems it would make sense)?
We’ve been wondering ourselves a lot lately, especially with all the news about his newest film, the horror film, “My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?” (Which evidently has already started shooting)
Well, don’t get your hopes up, according to a very recent L.A. Times interview the film still has no domestic distribution in the U.S. (dunno, about you, but this old L.A. Times interview with the producers kinda suggests they’re shady) We haven’t heard a peep about this project in a long time, but Herzog did discuss the picture last month in the U.K., in perhaps more detail then he ever has.
“It’s possibly a new form of film noir, and yet, it’s very much my film. I’m venturing out into new terrains. I’m in explorer mood, like when I was 24,” Herzog said, noting once again, the film wasn’t an Abel Ferrara movie remake, or at least he thinks its not because he’s never seen the original. “I added the subtitle, ‘Port of Call New Orleans,’ because it takes place in New Orleans. And the leading actor in this is Nicolas Cage, with whom I had a wonderful working relationship. I took him where he has not been before.”
Herzog described what he was aiming for with the film was capturing, “the bliss of evil” and says the film is oddly prescient to the economic climate (in his own, “unique” way of course).
“When I accepted this film, and I accepted partially because Nicolas Cage wouldn’t do it unless I directed. What was intriguing was the idea to put film noir on to a new different level that is appropriate to today. And that was in April or May when I accepted it. Sometimes cultural history coincides with economic history. When you look at the Great Depression in the 1930s, that spawned a type of literature, like Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, which in turn spawned the film noir, with Humphrey Bogart and Edward G Robinson and others. So, in my opinion, it is a result of a very intense economic and cultural climate of depression. When I said yes to it in April, I had the feeling that there was something coming at us, which in a way made it, I say it with caution, necessary to get into film noir and to develop it. And then, just when I had finished shooting, the economy started to collapse and unravel. It was more like a coincidence but there is something in the air and I think it is the right thing to do film noir nowadays.”
The film also co-stars Xzibit, Eva Mendes and Val Kilmer. Will we see it later this year?