Air America beta radio has mentioned last friday an unauthorized documentary about Leonardo DiCaprio’s life.You’re probably wondering, “What is this, the 90s?” In a way, yes. All of the footage featured in “Hangin’ With Leo” looks like it’s from the late 1990s, when DiCaprio was riding the wave of “Titanic” ending up on “The Beach.” If you would like [...]
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Body of Lies Captures Shifting Alliances of a Long War
Posted By Taly on March 1st, 2009
Body of Lies Captures Shifting Alliances of a Long War
Christian Hamaker
Crosswalk.com Contributing Writer
DVD Release Date: February 17, 2009
Theatrical Release Date: October 10, 2008
Rating: R (for strong violence including some torture, and for language throughout)
Genre: Action, Drama, Thriller
Run Time: 128 min.
Director: Ridley Scott
Actors: Russell Crowe, Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Strong, Golshifteh Farahani, Alon Abutbul, Ali Suliman, Kais Nashif
Ridley Scott has directed numerous classic films—Gladiator, Alien, Blade Runner and Black Hawk Down—but his cinematic track record is far from spotless. Scott can deliver bloated misfires as easily as he can a powerhouse Oscar contender. Remember Legend with Tom Cruise, or recent duds like A Good Year?
His career as a director has spanned decades, but unlike many of his colleagues, who work less frequently as they age, Scott’s output has ticked up in his twilight years. His new film, Body of Lies, is his fourth in four years, and his eighth since the turn of the century.
Last year’s Scott-helmed American Gangster generated heavy awards buzz upon its release, but the buzz faded, leaving the film unrecognized in most of the major Oscar categories. Could it be that the 70-year-old director is still looking for the right project to win him an elusive Best Director statue? (Scott was nominated in that category the year Gladiator won Best Picture, but watched as the directing Oscar went to Steven Soderbergh for Traffic.)
Now comes Body of Lies starring Oscar winner Russell Crowe and multiple Oscar nominee Leonardo DiCaprio in a CIA drama about the United States’ involvement in the Middle East. It is not up to Scott’s best work, but the performances—especially from DiCaprio—are strong, and the result is a film that seriously examines U.S. foreign policy while still managing to entertain. It’s not heavy-handed; its point about the extent and purpose of U.S. power provokes consideration rather than the alienation that has greeted so many of the Iraq War-themed movies in the past few years.
Adapted by William Monahan (The Departed) from a novel by David Ignatius, Body of Lies begins with a promise by Al-Saleem, a terrorist leader, to carry out a campaign of bloodshed in the West. We then hear the two CIA operatives, Ed Hoffman (Crowe) and Roger Ferris (DiCaprio), give voice to differing views about the U.S. pursuit of terrorists. “A long war will only make your enemy grow stronger,” says Ferris, who moves from one Middle East country to the next, cultivating sources to infiltrate the terrorist cell behind the campaign. Back in the United States, Hoffman tells others that the Islamic fighters “do not want to negotiate. They want the universal caliphate established.” He warns that “our world as we know it is a lot easier to put to an end than you think.”
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Warner Schedules Body of Lies for Blu-ray
Posted By Marcie on December 8th, 2008
December 05, 2008
Ridley Scott’s latest thriller Body of Lies starring box office heavyweights Leonardo Dicaprio and Russell Crowe has been given a green light by Warner Home Video for a February 17 debut on Blu-ray Disc, day-and-date with DVD.
Body of Lies will be presented on a BD-50 disc though we unfortunately do not have technical specs to share at this time. Given Warner’s other recent Blu-ray announcements, all of which feature Dolby TrueHD lossless audio, we feel confident they’ll continue the trend with Body of Lies.
Bonus features include something “interactive” which may or may not be exclusive to Blu-ray. We’ll have a better picture when the back cover art is released. Otherwise, the complete suite of extras is as follows.
Commentary with Director Ridley Scott, Screenwriter William Monahan, and Author David Ignatius
Actionable Intelligence: Deconstructing Body of Lies
Interactive Debriefing
Deleted Scenes
Digital Copy on Disc
Body of Lies has the standard new theatrical Warner Blu-ray retail price of $35.99. Pre-order pricing and high resolution cover art will be passed along when available.
Spy Games: Leonardo DiCaprio on ‘Body Of Lies’
Posted By Taly on December 3rd, 2008
Spy Games: Leonardo DiCaprio on ‘Body Of Lies’
Superstar Leonardo DiCaprio chats about his new CIA action-thriller, working with Ridley Scott and Russell Crowe, and why this election is going to be a real nail-biter.
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Titanic may have defined him as an iconic blue-eyed pretty boy for a generation of moviegoers, but for the last decade Leonardo DiCaprio has leveraged his early success to take on risky roles in socio-political films that could have marginalized his fan base. But with well-received performances, DiCaprio has managed to continue to be a box-office draw while tackling issues and projects close to his heart.
With three films in the pipeline for release, the Oscar-nominated actor has been busier than ever. Two dramas set in the mid-1950s (Sam Mendes’ Revolutionary Road and Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island) are preceded by Body of Lies, a spy thriller set in the Middle East. The film, which reunites actor Russell Crowe with director American Gangster director Ridley Scott, takes place in a not-so-distant future where European cities are frequently the target of terrorist bombings, and is based on the novel of the same name by Washington Post journalist David Ignatius.
DiCaprio plays CIA operative Roger Ferris who is plotting to bring a wanted terrorist out of hiding but instead gets caught in a larger game of deceit and subterfuge himself. DiCaprio talks about sharing the screen with Crowe under the direction of Scott, why the upcoming election is going to be a down-to-the-wire nail-biter, and why he’d love to get off “this rollercoaster of filmmaking” and do an off-Broadway play.
You first starred with Russell Crowe when you where 18 [in 1995's The Quick and Dead with Sharon Stone], pretty early on your career. How was it different this time, working with him professionally?
It was a different experience because I think that was — for both of us — our first experience working with a studio film in a big-budget production. I’m speaking for myself, for sure. [But] I do remember that being the case for Russell because I remember he had come fresh off Romper Stomper and had been talked about as a phenomenal actor from Australia that was doing incredible work… I think Sharon Stone had reached her feelers out and saw both of our performances and wanted to work with both of us. So we were kind of fresh and new to the whole business at that time, and we were kind of wide-eyed and bushy-tailed during that time period. And since then, I think we have both established a good resume of work together. It was really great to reunite, albeit for only a couple of weeks — a week and a half in Washington and then a little bit of time in Morocco — but I consider him to be one of the most talented actors of his generation, for sure. He’s got an incredible work ethic, and you have to admire somebody who really takes his work that seriously. It is a joy to work with somebody like that, and he has always been a great guy to me.
How would you compare Ridley Scott and Martin Scorsese in terms of their style and approach?
They are different. Not that Ridley isn’t meticulous with what he does, but Marty is very focused on each camera, at one given moment, capturing certain moments, whereas I think Ridley has a really innate ability to edit in his own mind, simultaneously with five or six cameras, and be able to have that type of focus where he can pop back from camera to camera. [He] really relies on his instincts, which are phenomenal. He has fantastic instincts when it comes to saying, “Okay, I believe what I saw on screen or I didn’t,” and will tell you that immediately and make changes immediately — whereas working with Scorsese is more time intensive. He really takes his time a lot more with scenes. But there are benefits to both. Certainly working with Ridley, [there is an] adrenaline rush you have every day working on set because you have cameras filming you from every different possible angle, and he could immediately flip the scene on its head at any given moment. You have to be prepared for that. In both scenarios you, have to know what you are doing and be secure in your own character, because anything could be thrown at you at any given moment. But they are much different directing styles, I think. Marty is very much about planned shots he had been thinking about for a long period of time whereas Ridley, I feel, wants to have every possibility on the day available to him to be able to make it up — not make it up as he goes along but improvise any given scenario or change things around. He loves his options.
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Good Fights
Posted By Taly on December 3rd, 2008
“Body of Lies” and “Happy-Go-Lucky.”
by David Denby October 13, 2008
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Russell Crowe and Leonardo DiCaprio in Ridley Scott’s new thriller.
There’s a startling moment in “Body of Lies,” the potent new thriller directed by Ridley Scott—a moment that not only crystallizes what the movie is about but shrewdly demonstrates the ironies of asymmetrical warfare in the age of terror. The hardworking C.I.A. field agent Roger Ferris (Leonardo DiCaprio) has got himself involved in a complicated plan to smoke out a Middle Eastern terrorist leader who has been coördinating a series of attacks in Europe. But Ferris, based in Amman, Jordan, makes the mistake of falling in love with an Iranian-born nurse (Golshifteh Farahani). When she’s kidnapped by the terrorists, he offers himself in exchange for her freedom. Ferris’s boss, Ed Hoffman (Russell Crowe), a C.I.A. honcho who has been running Ferris by cell phone and laptop from the suburbs of Washington, arrives in the Middle East to watch the exchange, by means of a Predator drone flying over the desert. The C.I.A. wants to see where Ferris is being taken; it’s willing to use him as bait. But the terrorists don’t play along; they arrive in four S.U.V.s, drive around in a circle (kicking up a cloud of dust, which blocks the Predator’s view), snatch Ferris, and drive off in four different directions. Which S.U.V. should the Americans follow? It’s a sharp précis of the entire movie: the Americans have all the technological advantages but they don’t know the people, the signs of trust and honor; they don’t know which way the terrorists are going, and they can’t find out.
The screenwriter, William Monahan (“The Departed”), working from a novel by the Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, presents Ferris as a kind of ideal, and he appears, depressingly, to be the only one in the C.I.A. with the cultural sensitivity to understand the nature of the war we’re fighting. Hoffman, a sweet-voiced but ruthless Southerner, has made antiterrorism into his calling—for him, civilization is at stake—but he’s too impatient. In the end, the Americans are scrambling for bits of information, pulling computer disks out of blown-up hideouts, using people in the Middle East left and right and then discarding them. People are killed by lies. This movie is not about a war that we are winning.
Much of the atmosphere and the action of “Body of Lies” is familiar from such recent films as “The Kingdom,” “Rendition,” “Vantage Point,” and “Traitor.” Ridley Scott flips back and forth from Washington to the Middle East, from drone surveillance to the street, from explosions and scenes of torture to men tearing across the desert with guns blazing. But the movie is smart and tightly drawn; it has a throat-gripping urgency and some serious insights, and Scott has a greater command of space and a more explicit way with violence than most thriller directors—Ferris gets mashed like a Florida orange in a squeezer. Best of all, Scott, after all these years, has become a good director of acting. The British stage-and-TV actor Mark Strong, in superbly tailored Savile Row suits, with patrician manners to match, is great fun to watch as Hani Salaam, the brilliant Jordanian intelligence chief, a man with burning eyes who will punish anyone who tries to lie to him. (He reserves deception for his own use.) DiCaprio, bearded, speaking Arabic with a variety of accents, gives a performance that is as fine and as intense as his work in “The Departed” and “Blood Diamond.” He doesn’t try to look cool; he sticks to the dirty business at hand. Along with Matt Damon, he is our most reliably effective young leading man. His Ferris has a streak of decency that makes him ashamed of the way the Americans deceive and manipulate people, and he gets into profane, knockabout arguments with Crowe, whose soft, Southern tones, which try to cover cynicism with charm, only make him angrier.
The craft of the movie is superb, but, in an odd way, “Body of Lies” replicates the dilemma that it shows the C.I.A. confronting. Structurally, the movie revolves around simultaneous knowledge: again and again, Ferris is somewhere in the desert or in the street, dodging his pursuers while trying to reel in a guy who wants to quit Al Qaeda, and, as everyone begins shooting, Hoffman is in his suburban house following the action by one electronic means or another while helping to get his kids off to school. His consumption habits are a recurring joke. He’s a greedy, American domestic animal—an advanced-media freak, always eating, while Ferris is getting mauled six thousand miles away. The movie shares Hoffman’s mastery of space and time, but, like some of his virtuosic but pointless manipulations, it has the feeling of a spasmodic exercise in the void. In the end, terror still escapes the filmmakers’ understanding.
Poppy (Sally Hawkins), the single, thirty-year-old London kindergarten teacher in Mike Leigh’s comedy “Happy-Go-Lucky,” bounces on a trampoline at the gym after work, but she doesn’t need much of a lift—she’s already airborne. Poppy has a bunny-hop walk, a chirping voice, and carnival clothes; she could be taken as a greeter at a medieval street fair. She’s always happy, and when a smile takes over Sally Hawkins’s face her eyes crinkle, and she looks a little like Lily Tomlin in a goofy mood. Poppy doesn’t often take seriously what others take seriously; she’s meant to be slightly annoying, but she’s a heroine nonetheless, or, at least, a test case for a heroine. Is the possession of the happiness gene enough to get you through life without harm? Or, to put it less grandly: can a woman like Poppy serve as the protagonist of a full-length movie? Leigh has not been known for a skipping-along-the-hedgerows view of existence. His vivid, funny, and biting films have made us aware of the misery of dashed expectations (“High Hopes”), the power of surly narcissism (“Naked”), the underside of creative partnership (“Topsy-Turvy”), the depths of working-class forlornness (“All or Nothing”) and inarticulate sacrifice (“Vera Drake”). But now he’s put at the center of a film a young woman who teases sourpuss clerks and comforts a crazy bum, whose grunts and snarls she understands. She’s a heroine because she’s afraid of nothing.
Posted in Body of Lies
Leonardo DiCaprio battles the odds in ‘Body of Lies’
Posted By Taly on December 3rd, 2008
Leonardo DiCaprio battles the odds in ‘Body of Lies’
Warner Bros.
IN HARM’S WAY: Ed Hoffman (Russell Crowe), left, and Roger Ferris (Leonardo DiCaprio) in a scene from “Body of Lies.”
It wasn’t only his CIA-agent character’s battle against scores of terrorists on screen. It was learning to work with the tag-team of director Ridley Scott and costar Russell Crowe on set.
LEONARDO DiCAPRIO didn’t realize he was in over his head until it was too late. “I was constantly fueled with adrenaline,” DiCaprio remembers of filming his new espionage thriller, “Body of Lies.” “There were certainly moments of sheer anxiety.”
He wasn’t talking about the physical hardships he endured for director Ridley Scott’s homage to such ’70s political potboilers as “The Parallax View” and “Three Days of the Condor” — although the 33-year-old Los Feliz native did endure plenty.
DiCaprio’s character, undercover CIA operative Roger Ferris, is treated like a human piñata. He narrowly outruns terrorist bombs, gets torn up by shrapnel in a helicopter missile strike and attacked by a rabid dog while on a covert mission to take down a Middle Eastern terrorist cell. In addition, Ferris must navigate the treacherous shoals of his own government’s convoluted agenda in the region, his progress undercut at every step by a ruthless agency station chief played by Russell Crowe.
Worse, in actuality, DiCaprio was stricken by a respiratory illness after filming a harrowing, emotionally exhausting torture sequence in an ancient Moroccan prison — the actor’s latest movie war wound; he sustained a minor knee injury while filming 2006′s “Blood Diamond” in Mozambique. “If you’re going to put something like that on film, we all had an understanding that it had to be as realistic and frightening as it could possibly be,” DiCaprio said of the torture scene, while seated across from Scott on a leafy patio atop the director’s West Hollywood production company complex.
Based on Washington Post political columnist David Ignatius’ novel of the same name, “Body of Lies” makes the harshest appraisal of American foreign policy of any big-budget studio film produced during the second Bush administration. The movie posits that our country has lost its direction in the Middle East, portraying frontline operatives as working without strategy or the necessary willingness to cooperate with foreign governments to achieve peace. “We’re waging war in a place we don’t entirely understand,” said DiCaprio, who consulted with a former head of the CIA in preparation for the role.
But what really put the actor outside his comfort zone on “Body of Lies” was the unique professional mojo between Scott and Crowe — a hard-charging duo that takes a perverse pride in skipping any conventional rehearsal process and who would excise huge chunks of the script just moments before the cameras rolled. For DiCaprio, thrice Oscar-nominated and something of a muse to Martin Scorsese (after starring in the director’s “Gangs of New York” and “The Departed” as well as the upcoming “Shutter Island”), it wasn’t easy being the odd man out. And those kind of challenges to his normal process triggered a fight-or-flight response.
“You hear it a lot in this business, that there’s a ‘shorthand’ between an actor and a director,” DiCaprio explained. “But Russell and Ridley were really accustomed to working together. It took me a few weeks to get used to that work process and into that pacing. It’s just a few words then, ‘Boom! Boom! Boom! Let’s take that whole sequence out. You got it? All right. You agree? Great. We’re gonna shoot it in 10 minutes.’ ”
With characteristic movie-star magnanimity — a kind of default setting of celeb-speak that puts positive gloss on negative experiences, verging close, at times, to damnation by faint praise — he added: “I learned a lot from that.”
‘Ridley’s a wild man’
SCOTT AND Crowe mark their fourth movie pairing with “Body of Lies,” which reaches theaters Friday. It’s a road-tested relationship responsible for the best picture Oscar-winning “Gladiator” (2000) and the 2007 box-office smash “American Gangster” (as well as 2006′s schmaltzy rom-com “A Good Year”). The director justified his methodology by pointing out that a table reading is usually enough to give the actors their “motivation.” And that the shoot-now-ask-questions-later M.O. that he and Crowe have perfected allows interactions to be “a more visceral thing” in the director’s view.
“I know who can do what,” Scott growled. “I don’t need a run-through. I know these guys are going to do their . . . crap. The real rehearsal happens real fast. You walk on the set. ‘What do you think?’ Usually, within 15 minutes, we’re shooting.”
Producer Donald DeLine was on location for much of the movie’s principal photography in Morocco and the Eastern Seaboard late last year. And although he stops short of saying DiCaprio was out of his element, he witnessed the actor’s gradual adjustment to Scott’s ways and means. “Leo’s such a professional, such a prepared actor and takes it all so seriously,” DeLine said. “But he got to know that Ridley’s a wild man. He’s got the ideas in his head; as an actor your job is to figure it out. He’s a force of nature.”
DiCaprio sounds more awed than bitter, more like an earnest drama student than a mollycoddled A-lister, recalling working on “Body of Lies” — in fact, his second movie with Crowe. The two shot the 1995 western “The Quick and the Dead” together in Arizona when DiCaprio was much younger and a pre-”L.A. Confidential” Crowe was still largely unknown outside Australia. “We only had a few scenes together but we hung out a lot in Tucson,” DiCaprio said.
Confounding his standard operating procedure even further, DiCaprio wrapped production on the ’50s-set romantic drama “Revolutionary Road” just weeks before shooting commenced on “Body of Lies.” The film adaptation of Richard Yates’ award-winning novel, which arrives in theaters this holiday season, reteams DiCaprio with his “Titanic” costar Kate Winslet as a suburban couple facing the disintegration of their marriage. But “Revolutionary Road’s” Oscar-winning director Sam Mendes’ immersive method of prep couldn’t have resembled Scott’s run-and-gun technique any less.
“I had just come from ‘Revolutionary Road’ which was kind of like a Broadway play,” DiCaprio said. “It was endless talking about the relationship of these two characters. Rehearsals to the utmost. Carefully planning out each shot, each moment, each mood. It was a delicate process, which is important for that kind of movie. A month later, I was slammed into this big-game hunter’s way of shooting.”
Um, big-game hunter’s way of shooting?
“We’re sitting there in the middle of the desert, choppers are flying above us, I’ve got to get my scene, the sun’s going down and a jeep is waiting for us to get in,” DiCaprio said. “I’m like, ‘Ridley! Let’s just stop for one second. How the hell is this supposed to work?’ And he’s like, ‘Let’s not worry about it. If it doesn’t work, we’ll shoot it again.’
“His favorite thing to say is, ‘Let’s shoot it.’ He’s unlike any other filmmaker I’ve worked with in that regard. It seems like chaos but he makes it look so easy.”
Listening in, Scott seemed impatient with all the hullabaloo over his style but also proud. In his inimitably gruff way, the director set out to return the compliment.
“It’s easy when you have people thinking on their feet,” Scott said. “He’s quick on his feet because he’s been working since he was 9!”
“Thirteen,” said DiCaprio, smirking.
“Well, you looked 9,” Scott said with finality. “He’s very experienced. This guy is comfortable at the dance.”
Posted in Body of Lies
Leonardo and Rodley Scott: LA Times article
Posted By Taly on December 3rd, 2008
By Chris Lee, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
September 7, 2008
SUFFICE IT to say that Leonardo DiCaprio and Ridley Scott agree to disagree about certain principles of the Geneva Conventions.
“If I’m going to get down to brass tacks, there’s no rules,” Scott exclaimed, sitting on the sun-drenched deck of his West Hollywood production company. He was speaking hypothetically about his willingness to use torture to extract information from a suspected terrorist — a pivotal plot point in the knighted British director’s political thriller “Body of Lies.” The film, starring DiCaprio and Russell Crowe as CIA operatives out to smash terror cells in the Middle East, reaches theaters Oct. 10.
“If I want to get the information out of somebody, I have to do it,” Scott continued. “And it makes it a lot easier if that person put a bomb in a square or blew up a bunch of kids. I’d definitely take a cricket bat to him.” He glanced over at DiCaprio for confirmation. “Right?”
DiCaprio clamped his lips together, averted eye contact and almost imperceptibly shook his head no. Awkward moment, anyone? The hard-charging director suddenly reversed course. “Never let me be the head of any counter-terrorist organization,” Scott said, chuckling.
Adapted by William Monahan, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of “The Departed,” from Washington Post columnist David Ignatius’ intricately plotted espionage novel of the same name, “Body of Lies” presents the most stinging screen portrayal of American foreign policy by any Hollywood studio movie in recent memory. DiCaprio portrays Roger Ferris, an idealistic field agent operating out of Iraq and Jordan who resorts to elaborate subterfuge — concocting a fictitious sleeper cell and staging a mock bombing — to flush a terrorist mastermind out into the open.
Crowe plays Ed Hoffman, the veteran stateside CIA bureaucrat who thwarts Ferris’ progress at every turn with his own covert missions and unquenchable thirst for power. And along the way, American spies torture a suspect (yes, with a cricket bat), innocent people’s lives are ruined via satellite downlink and foreign nationals who cooperate with the agents wind up being sacrificed in the name of homeland security. “Welcome to Guantanamo Bay,” hisses one would-be torturer in the movie.
It’s a deliberate throwback to Nixon-era conspiracy thrillers, films that spotlighted American political skulduggery and corruption. “To make a highly intelligent film with today’s politics: That was the objective,” DiCaprio said. “This movie could — not necessarily say something about the state of the world, but — take grasp of where we are in history right now.”
Arriving in the climactic days of an election year, however, at a time when public fatigue with war on two fronts is at an all-time high, “Body of Lies” might be a hard sell. As DiCaprio and Scott seem only too aware, a spate of earlier films set in and around the social fallout of the Iraq war — “Rendition,” “Stop-Loss,” “The Kingdom” and “In the Valley of Elah” — failed to connect with audiences.
“It is a failed subject matter in the sense that none of those films has been successful,” DiCaprio said. “But whether ['Body of Lies'] was going to be commercial or not was never a factor. It’s the opportunity that we get to make this movie. You feel lucky to get to do it. The audience can get involved while simultaneously getting insight into what the United States is doing in the Middle East.”
Scott was more blunt. “Do I think it’s a commercial movie? My gut tells me it’s a commercial movie,” he said. “I think a lot of those Iraq war movies were jingoistic. This one isn’t jingoistic. The audiences smell that.”
The film offers plenty of other visceral stimulation as well, tautly paced around shootouts, car chases and lushly photographed explosions courtesy of cinematographer Alexander Witt.
Big ideas too.
Known for his crusading efforts as an environmentalist with a growing affinity for appearing in issue-oriented films (2006′s “Blood Diamond” is plotted around how so-called conflict diamonds fuel civil war in sub-Saharan Africa), DiCaprio says he checked his political agenda at the door when he signed onto the project. But researching his character with a former head of the CIA (whom the actor declined to name) and coming to understand something of how agency operations are run in the Middle East gave him a new perspective on the peace process.
“You don’t want anyone to leave with a moral judgment when they see a movie like this,” DiCaprio said. “But the more we did the movie, the more we got involved with the day-to-day operations of the CIA — you realize what they’re undertaking. The thought of stopping this in one or two wars? In 10, 20 years? If there’s any moral message to the movie, it’s that we’ve bitten off so much more than we can chew.”
For his part, Scott said that since filming his 2001 historical war thriller “Black Hawk Down,” he’s felt obligated to make movies that are “about something.” Coming off the smash-hit success of last year’s “American Gangster,” he intends “Body of Lies” to voice certain hard truths about the United States — even if that means ruffling some feathers in his adopted country.
“I’m not American. I’ve been here in the U.S. all my career, and over the last 30 years things have changed dramatically,” Scott said. “It’s an evolution, a softening process. We’re not as hard as we were. We’re way too accepting of political situations that are, frankly, outrageous. Don’t you agree?”
Again, the director looked to DiCaprio. “Is this going to get us in trouble?” Scott asked.
DiCaprio didn’t miss a beat. “Is this movie going to get us in trouble?”
Posted in Body of Lies
Body of Lies B-Roll
Posted By Marcie on December 3rd, 2008
B-roll for Body of Lies provides a compilation of behind the scenes footage from the film.
More Body of Lies on Set pics
Posted By Marcie on December 31st, 2007
You can view pics from the set
Here
Body of Lies On Set pics
Posted By Marcie on December 31st, 2007
You can view pics from the set
Here
Oscar Isaac
Posted By Marcie on December 18th, 2007
ANDELMAN: What it is you are working on now? You made reference.
ISAAC: It’s a film called Body of Lies. It’s Ridley Scott’s next film. It’s with Leo DiCaprio and Russell Crowe.
ANDELMAN: Wow.
ISAAC: Yeah. Great film.
ANDELMAN: That’s definitely big-time stuff.
ISAAC: It’s good. It’s very exciting. We’re shooting in Morocco.
ANDELMAN: What is your role in that?
ISAAC: I play the partner to Leo’s character. We start off the movie together. I get to do some car chases, and it’s a very explosive character.
ANDELMAN: I have to ask, I didn’t know you were doing this, what’s it like working with Leonardo DiCaprio?
ISAAC: It’s great. You know, you never know when you are going into one of these situations. You are like, “I hope they’re not jerks,” or whatever, but he’s a really nice, really funny guy. We were joking around right off the bat and already starting to improvise and doing different things, and he’s a really good, solid actor. He’s a great actor and seems like a really great guy.
ANDELMAN: A guy like that’s been around a while now. Is he a little, at first when you come on the set with someone like that, he doesn’t know you, you don’t know him I’m assuming until you meet on the set. Is he a little standoffish at first?
ISAAC: You know what? No. I think that’s what was the most shocking. That’s what I would assume, but no, he was actually incredibly humble, he was really warm, seemingly excited to meet me. I was honestly taken aback with the whole thing. I kind of felt bad for even expecting otherwise. He’s a really good guy.
ANDELMAN: And what about Ridley Scott? How is he to work with?
ISAAC: To see an auteur at the top of his game and still completely passionate about it, excited about it, and also, he’s very much about the best idea wins, so strangely, again, there’s this seeming lack of ego. He’s sure, he knows what he wants. It’s a well-oiled machine. At one point, the sun was going down and people are running around with their heads cut off. There was like a whole group of hundreds of people at barricades trying to catch a glimpse of Leo, and Leo is frustrated about one thing or something else, and I mean, things are kind of going crazy. The light’s going, and I see Ridley standing in the middle of it all, looking at it, and he looks over at me, and I wink at him, and he walks over, and he’s like, “This is where I shot Black Hawk Down. Oh man, it was awesome!” I was like, “So you like this, eh? It’s like anarchy.” He’s like, “Oh yeah, I love it.”
ANDELMAN: You’ve completed another film, Guerrilla.
ISAAC: Yeah. That’s the Soderburgh film that I shot about Che Guevara, with Benicio del Toro.
ANDELMAN: What is your role in that?
ISAAC: It’s two films, and I’m in the second film. I play Che Guevara’s translator when he comes to the United Nations. The film is in Spanish, except that this section is in English where I translate all the things he says and when he goes on “Meet the Press.” He had this actually son of a diplomat who wasn’t a professional translator translating for him. It’s kind of funny, because he listened to the tape, he watched the tape, and you can tell he got a little bit lost, which is good, because I was a little bit lost myself.
ANDELMAN: What would you like to do in the future? It wouldn’t be hard to see you jumping into a buddy caper, like a Rush Hour, but you seem to be heading into kind of more serious, from what we were just talking about, more serious roles.
ISAAC: I like the idea of doing “serious roles” but finding the humor and the humanity and the every man in that. I don’t necessarily see myself doing a broad comedy or action films necessarily. I want to do things that have something to say, whether it be political or whether it be about the human condition, but something that has something to say, like those films from the 1970s. You felt that they were made for a reason, not just to satisfy some sort of budgetary need or something.
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