It's not often that something big brings art and film together, and when it does, naturally, I'm excited. (Imagine Silicon Valley's coding guys when The Social Network came out.) I attended Apple's latest 'Meet the Filmmaker' event at the Regent Street store, not only because you can't skip a chance to meet Alan Rickman, Colin Firth AND Cameron Diaz, but because I had some tiny hope that this film might star a Monet painting alongside a stellar cast. However more often than not these films aren't about paintings at all. This is one of those false alarms.
Gambit (out on 21 November 2012) is a rehash of a 1966 art heist comedy also named Gambit. Power brothers Joel and Ethan Coen rewrote the screenplay, adjusting the plot so that it's no longer a carefully planned and funnily failing art robbery, but an art dealer's (Firth) revenge on an abusive billionaire boss (Rickman). Colin Firth steps in for Michael Cain, Cameron Diaz is Shirley MacLaine, and Alan Rickman stands in for Herbert Lom's part – the boss who is being tricked into buying a fake 'Wheatstacks (End of Summer)'. Here the Coen brothers flick off their serious, gritty drama switch (No Country For Old Men, Burn After Reading, True Grit) and return to farcical crime comedy.
As Cameron Diaz put it: "We're not reinventing comedy here, we're doing something that's really familiar. It's the comfort food of comedy".
And this was how the evening carried out. The lineup was in exactly this spirit, joking away when answering seriously intended questions (poor us). When someone asked if any pranks took place on set, Diaz cheekily recounted a time when Colin Firth turned up without any trousers and Alan Rickman followed him showing up naked. Did that really happen? Nope. Firth comedically insisted that 'the focus should always be on himself' and Diaz showed actor Tim Courtenay her puppy dog eyes. Don't get me wrong, there is something thrilling about laughing at a celebrity's joke in person, but you can't meet three of the world's biggest actors and go away with fluff! Here's what left me leaving with the biggest smile...
Cameron Diaz watching herself in character.
When clips from the film were played on VT screens, she watched herself so intently and discretely mouthed her script as if none of us were there watching her back. You could see her brain clogs churning away: Did I give it enough southern-twang? Am I convincing? Do I look okay? When she realised her face was flexing, she snapped right out of it and diverted her gaze in the opposite direction. To all of us she did just fine, but I bet she's one critical lady. I'd love to interview her one day.
Alan Rickman's method to picking a script.
"Well, it's a simple process really. Somebody sends you a script and you read it and you check your availability. They've checked your availability as well and then you find out who's in it. What's the personnel going to be and who are you going to be spending the next ... because it's a big lump of your life. This is the weird thing about a movie: it's two hours to you and it's maybe 6, 8, 10 or 12 weeks to us. You want to be sure that that's going to be a fruitful period of your life because that's what it amounts to. But ultimately it's what you read on the page that makes you say yes or no. And I don't know why I do that. It's a weird instinctive thing. What did I last do? What do I want to do next? This word jumping off the page. Do I want to say it rather than read it?"
Asking someone what their favourite film is...
Cameron: "Like asking someone who their favourite child is"
Michael Hoffman (director): "I could probably tell you more easily which one wasn't my favourite"
Colin Firth: "Your children?" [everyone laughs]
Michael Hoffman: "I guess what the truth for me is when you're in the middle of them, they're just completely engaging and after they're done, I almost never ever look at them again. It's just over and I'm happy about it and really excited I took part in it but I have a tendency to look forward not back."
