- Title: Vigo - Passion For Life
- Date: 16th May 2000
- Description:VIGO - PASSION FOR LIFE Jean Vigo, just out of college, is consigned to the bleak world of a sanatorium in the Pyrenees, to cure him of tuberculosis. A rebellious spirit, Jean finds a natural enemy in Dr Gerard, the sanatorium's director, who treats his patients like guinea pigs, subjecting them to dehumanising regimes that seem to have negligible effect on their condition but sap their will to live. Lydu Lozinska is a typical case. She has been there for two years, is reliant on her doctors, and has no hope for a future beyond the sanatorium. But Jean is immediately attracted to her and his determination to give her something to live and hope for grows as he finds himself falling in love with her. Gradually, Lydu responds to Jean's ardent nature and charm. But as she gets to know him, she becomes aware that his child-like, anarchic facade conceals a dark shadow that haunts his dreams, his memory, his imagination: the murder of his father (a notorious anarchist and pacifist during the First World War) in mysterious circumstances when he was a boy of 12. It's a legacy that gives Jean's personality a mercurial and reckless dimension and fuels his passion to make film in order to challenge the establishment and vindicate his father. Finally, despite all Dr Gerard's efforts to persuade her against what he views as a dangerous liaison, Lydu commits to Jean and to a future beyond the institution on which she has become dependent. They escape from the sanatorium and are married in Nice. Neither Jean nor Lydu are fully cured of their illness and both are acutely aware of their mortality. Having survived despair and the ordeal of the sanatorium, they are determined to live what time they have to the full. But the love that enabled them to make their life-affirming choice will be tested and challenged to the limit as the narrative takes them from the joyful exuberance of their early married life in Nice, through dark and difficult times in Paris. The forces that would undermine Jean and Lydu come in several forms, from within and without. The spectre of illness continues to cast a shadow over their joie de vivre. It is rare that they are both well at the same time, invariably one is sick whilst the other is well. The emotional and physical responsibility of always having to support one another puts immense pressure on them. This pressure is compounded by Jean's vocation - making films. He starts as a runner at the Victorine Studios in Nice, eschewing the deadly world of factory film-making, he makes his own typically rebellious movie on the streets of the decadent capital of the Cote d'Azur. Finally he decides to try his luck in Paris, to no avail until a shrewd and wealthy amateur producer takes him under his wing and secures the funding for Jean to make two full-length films. But as Jean pursues this career, he is torn between his vocation and his marriage, between the group of like-minded friends who work with him and the woman on whom he depends, and who depends on him. Jean's determination to succeed on his own terms inflicts on the couple periods of grinding hardship and poverty, of separation and alienation - which in turn have an adverse effect on their health and well-being. Lastly, the relationship between the lovers is challenged by the demons from Jean's past, which are brought vividly into the present as Jean's work begins to make enemies amongst the same night-wing circles that had once been responsible for discrediting and murdering his father - and which are now casting a long shadow over 1930's Europe. The first of Jean's two films is a thinly-veiled attack on the authoritarian forces who silenced his father. When it is banned by the state, Jean becomes increasingly absorbed with the idea of avenging his father's memory, and the distorting prism of his obsession threatens to undermine his marriage - just as it once destroyed Jean's relationship with his mother. A resolution to this troubled family heritage becomes imperative when Jean and Lydu themselves become parents -to a daughter, Claire. Love appears to triumph and Jean's last film is a celebration of love's JOYS and sorrows. But while this celebration will last forever, captured on film, Jean and Lydu must now prepare to face the ultimate challenge: their own. Catching Fire is a tragic but inspiring love story. loosely based on the passionate relationship between JEAN VIGO and his beautiful wife Lydu. The film celebrates the lives of these two young people who managed to live more intensely in the few years they were together than most of us do in an entire lifetime. A Channel Four Films Presentation, in association with Little Magic Films, of an Impact Pictures/Nitrate Films/MACT Production Catching Fire stars Romane Bohringer (César-winner for Cyril Collard's Savage Nights) as Lydu and James Frain (Thaddeus O'Sullivan's Nothing Personal) as Jean Vigo. The film finished production on 9th March, 1997 after a nine-and-a- half week shoot on location in and around London, and in France at the original sanatorium in Font Romeu where Jean Vigo and Lydu first met and fell in love, Nice and Pans. The film is directed by Julien Temple (The Great Rock 'n' Roll Scandal, Absolute Beginners, Earth Girls are Easy) and produced by Amanda Temple and Jeremy Bolt (Paul Anderson's Shopping/Event Horizon). Jean Vigo was one of the most influential film-makers of the 20th century and even though he made only four films in his short lifetime (A Propos de Nice, Taris Champion de Natation, Zero de Conduite and LAtalante) before his untimely death at the age of 29, the magical and surrealistic touches in his films have inspired film directors ever since to create film classics of their own including Francois Truffatit's 400 Blows, Lindsay Anderson's If and Louis Malle's Au Revoir Les Enfants. CHANNEL FOUR FILMS present in association with LITTLE MAGIC FILMS Catching Fire, an Impact Pictures/Nitrate Films/MACT co-production in association with Road Movies and Tornasol, with the participation of Canal Plus and the European Script Fund. The producers are Amanda Temple (Nitrate Films) and Jeremy Bolt (Impact Pictures) with executive producer Kiki Miyake (Little Magic Films) and co-producers Mariela Besuievsky (Tornasol Films) and Antoine de Clermont-Tonnerre (MACT), who was responsible for the French shoot. The film is directed by Julien Temple and written by Peter Ettedgui, Anne DevIin and Jullen Temple, based on the play, Love's A Revolution by Chris Ward. The film will be released theatrically by Film Four Distributors and Film Four International in all territories apart from Japan/South Korea (Little Magic Films), France (MACT), Germany (Road Movies) and Spain (Tornasol Films). ABOUT THE PRODUCTION I think the spirit of Vigo is more necessary, more important, than it has ever been before - Julien Temple Catching Fire is not a biographical film. It is a modem and very personal take on an extraordinary love story, inspired by the life of Jean Vigo and his wife Lydu. It has taken 10 years of relentless commitment and sheer hard work by director Julien Temple and his producers, Amanda Temple and Jeremy Bolt to make the film they wanted without compromising Vigo's life or talent and it is very much Jullen Temple's own interpretation of Jean and Lydu's life together. "Vigo's spirit and presence is still very much alive and we wanted to celebrate that by showing our version of the love story between him and Lydu', Temple says. "Even people who know Vigo's films don't understand the extraordinary nature of his life, or this love story which encompassed him and drove him to take risks and experiment on screen showing sexual love and relationship at a time when it simply was not even contemplated". It was producer, Jeremy Bolt, who first showed Julien Temple Chris Ward's script of his play, Love's a Revolution, after hearing that it was Vigo who first inspired Temple to become a film director. Based on Jean Vigo's life, the play was performed in 1984 at the Ritzy and Scala cinemas in London as part of a Vigo film season and at London's Swan Theatre. Temple, of course, was immediately determined to make a film, but it was important that it would never be a biopic. There were so many dimensions to Vigo's life, but research returned again and again to the immediacy and intensity of his life with Lydu and it began to be clear that their short, passionate life together was the driving force behind his films. Without Lydu there would be no L'Atalante. Writing the screenplay for Catching Fire has been a close collaborative process between writers Julien Temple, Peter Ettedgui and Anne DevIin. "When I came on board", Ettedgui says now, I was encouraged to use both Love's a Revolution and Vigo's biography as source material. "It was clear, from the start, that Jean and Lydu had this wonderful love affair which was so very strong", Ettedgui continues. "People I talked to in Paris, who knew and worked with Vigo, always asked me if I was going to write about Almereyda, because they said I couldn't write about Vigo without writing about his father as well. He didn't talk about him a lot, but you could tell there was something firing him, living the way that he did, this ghost from an unresolved past". With a rough script in place, the production team set about finding backing for the film. The first person to actually get behind the film and support it five years ago was the distinguished French producer, Antoine de Clermont-Tonnere of MACT. "I loved the idea of making a film about Jean Vigo", De Clermont-Tonnere says, "Vigo belongs to the world and there is no reason why it has to be made in French. It is a marvellous story and cries out to be told, and I hope it will acquaint people with Vigo's work". Amanda Temple, knowing that Kiki Miyake of Little Magic Productions in New York had a formidable reputation for acquiring rights on quality films for Japan, called her four years ago. I loved the script immediately", Kiki Miyake says now in her capacity as executive producer. "It's moving, passionate, inspirational and about living for the moment". Lacking the key financing, Jeremy Bolt with Julien and Amanda Temple took the idea to Channel Four Films, who were very interested in the project, but asked for specific additions to the script. It was at this point that playwright Anne DevIin joined the team. "Anne really supplied a certain sensibility to the story and made Lydu a much stronger character," Ettedgui says. "Although there was Chris' play, myself, then Anne and finally Julien, I don't think the script ever changed direction like it usually does if you have a number of writers on a project. It has evolved in a very organic way because Julien, Amanda and Jeremy have been so involved and passionate about the story, the man and the script right from the start". When DevIin met with Bolt and the Temples initially, they were quick to explain that the script's structure was in place. "They always emphasised that Jean and Lydu were so close as lovers", DevIin says, "that, in the end, they shared the same dream when he was dying. That was the crux for me, and suddenly what happened was that I found myself writing the dream sequence through their relationship". In April 1996, after Julien Temple had re-written many of the scenes to bring the final script together, Channel Four Films gave their approval and by November the film was about to roll. At the last moment, however, the anticipated lottery funding did not materialise and the producers had to go out and obtain further financing. Mariela Besuievsky of Spain's Tornasol Films, Ulrich Felsberg of Road Movies, Germany were already co-producers. Now thanks to Barbara Thomas, financial patron and the loyal champion of young film-makers and Germany's Berlinerbank, Catching Fire had the green light, but with the Bank's involvement the whole film's finances needed restructuring. With incredible speed, and working around the clock, the film was finally made ready to begin shooting on Monday, 2nd January, 1997. Catching Fire is an English film about a French subject and Julien Temple wanted a strong French presence in the film. Romane Bohringer was the only actress he ever seriously considered for Lydu and even though, when he auditioned her, she spoke no English he was convinced that she would learn English within a year. It is quite remarkable that when the 24-year-old actress began work on that first wintry shooting day at Twickenham Studios she had already mastered English, and over the weeks of production became not only proficient, but learnt some very fruity vocabulary from the English crew. "There is no artifice in Romane", Temple says. "She has a feral, animal quality which is unusual to find in a French actress. Having seen her in Savage Nights and The Accompanist, I really felt she had the passion for this role". Temple cast English actor James Frain as Jean Vigo. "James Frain is definitely one of the best young actors around and when we saw him it was suddenly obvious that he was Vigo", Temple explains. "He has this extraordinary intensity and energy, but also a fragility, a haunted feeling in his eyes at times which suddenly disappears into another life. He really transforms himself. He lost a tremendous amount of weight for the part and he is so powerful when he is dying you are convinced that he is terribly ill. The commitment is astonishing. He could give us the range and the humour and the energy that we needed, but also this darkness, this illness. 'Together, I think James and Romane have an extraordinary beauty which comes from who they are. At moments they may not look beautiful but they will astonish you how they look. I think this is the wonderful thing about this couple". The distinguished cast also include Spanish actor Adolfo Fernandez Moya, who stars as Vigo's father, Miguel Almereyda, a key, but silent, role in the film as Almereyda's legacy dominates Vigo's life; British actress, Diana Quick stars as Vigo's estranged mother, Emily; Jim Carter and Paola Dionisotti as the notorious anarchist friends of Vigo's family, Bonaventure and Marie; Williarn Scott-Masson as Vigo's oldest friend, Marcel; Vigo's gang are comprised of Nicholas Hewetson as the cameraman Boris Kaufman, Brian Shelley as the composer Maurice Jaubert, Frank Lazarus as producer Jacques-Louis Nounez and Lee Ross's character is based on a combination of people, including Henri Storck; James Faulkner plays the formidable Dr. Gerard and Ken Cranham as the producer; Francine Berge and Vernon Dobtcheff are Lydu's parents, Mama and Papa Lozinska. THE PRODUCTION TEAM Set in the 1930s, Julien Temple tried to avoid the trappings of a 'period' film with camera work which has an urgency and lightness of touch, irreverent images and ironic humour which keep it very much in the present. "This is not a film about the thirties", Temple says. "It's about two people whose spirit and temperament are ahead of them. They are living on another time scale with a different agenda to keep to and we have tried to capture that". Clearly set apart from the present tense narrative of Jean and Lydu's story are Jean's memories of his childhood with Almereyda. They have the fantastic, surreal logic of dreams. Predominantly without dialogue and using stylised sound effects, these flashback sequences have the visual texture of the early days of silent film. Shot from the low angle point-of-view of a child, and using the wide disorientating lenses of Bill Brandt's photographs, this inner 'shadow story' takes place within a secret theatre of memory. Temple acknowledges that he needed an artist to attempt the shots, angles, lighting and logistical problems that he envisioned for Catching Fire, because as he says artists take risks. Director of Photography, John Mathieson, who was awarded 'Chevalier De L'Ordre Des Arts Et Des Lettres'by the French Government in 1996, fits that job description. I think John has that same kind of spirit as Vigo", Temple says. "He's willing to risk doing things in a radically different way. Low light, very slow lenses and very slow film. It's dangerous, but it looks great". Temple feels the key to the strength of the film is the relationship between the two main characters and he has avoided tricks and on-screen over-elaboration and spectacle. The film is rich in crane shots, hand-held camera-work, static shots with a careful combination of angles, lenses and use of location and there are very few filters in use. The naturalness of the film emphasises its honesty in showing all the wrinkles. This is a love story, but it is not sentimentalised. A powerful relationship, which is also incredibly difficult to achieve and sustain. Catching Fire is startlingly real. "Julien is a very visual director", Production Designer Caroline Greville-Morris says. "At our first meeting on this film, he gave me a huge 4-inch deep wadge of photocopy visual reference and told me this was the kind of feel he wanted. But within that he's given me complete freedom." The film has three main locations with their own characteristics and colour schemes she continues. "Monochromatic and clear blue, white and grey with green trees at the film's start in the totally sterile world of the sanatorium at Font Romeu high in the Pyrenees, the actual sanatorium where Jean and Lydu first met. It is regimented, harsh and nasty. Machines, sounds, starkness. "They are married in Nice, which is the happy time. Nice is warm light, peeling and crumbling, the fecundity of summer with strong Fauve colours, laughter and music. As Jean becomes iller working in Paris, there are muddy greens and cream deteriorating, as he does, to a grey and foggy feel, claustrophobic space ends with his death". Roger Burton, the Costume Designer has worked with Julien Temple ever since Absolute Beginners. -I am fascinated by mixing periods up and just letting the clothes speak for themselves", he says about the look for Catching Fire. I wanted to give a thirties feel, but combining it with modem clothes to give a very period/contemporary look. "In the sanatorium", Burton continues, "we tried to keep the colours quite sombre to drain the skin, greys and pale greens. Whereas in Nice, Lydu is particularly colourful there, turquoise blues, greens and yellows with ornaments of butterflies and flowers. In Paris the barge scenes, the park, where the colours in themselves are quite muted we have kept to dark colours, and of course when they are ill we tend to keep them dark to drain them. Also to emphasise Jean's illness we have tended not to press his clothes, so they look as though he sleeps in them. It's a subtle touch, not a big statement, but it feels very real". Liz Daxauer, the Hair and Make-up Artist on Catching Fire works with Roger Burton a great deal. They complement each other and usually come up with similar ideas almost on a telepathic basis. "At the beginning, when Jean is a little child, he is always fragile and dark around the eyes", Daxauer says. "In the sanatorium he is quite straight looking, neatly brushed back hair, a bit high on colour in the cheeks because of his fever. I see Lydu in the sanatorium more like the paintings of Frida Kahlo, who was always ill as well. Lydu's one colour there. She looks like a canvas with a pale complexion, except for high colour in the cheeks, and long straight hair. "In Nice they both look healthier ", Daxauer says, "The hair is fuller, groomed and quite casual. Lydu has put her hair up and she plays around with colours on her eyes, like a child in her excitement. She puts flowers and ornaments in her hair and rhinestones on her eyes, always trying different things. There is a real change with Jean in Paris. His health is declining and he doesn't shave anymore. Everything is going wrong, despair, he gets paler, the hair becomes messier". Bingen Mendizabal is a well-known Basque composer, who Julien Temple believes, brings a real edge to the film. "Bingen's compositions for the film are inspired by the music of Maurice Jaubert, who worked with Vigo, and broke all the rules on music for film". Portions of Jaubert's original music are also featured in Catching Fire. Editor, Marie-Therese Boiche admits to being a good foil for the film because of her Frenchness. "This film is so special", she says now. "It is totally Julien Temple's film, and all the elements are so strong. John Mathieson's camera work and lighting. Romane brings such passion to the film, fresh air and joie-de-vivre. James is a very fine actor. An incredible face, a voice I like very much. And at the end of the day, try as I did to avoid parallels, the film is a respectable gesture to Jean Vigo, a tiny hommage to him". LOCATIONS AND SETS Logistically Catching Fire has so many varied locations in the UK and France that it is remarkable that the film finished on time and budget with no international incident to speak of. Enormous credit is due to the producers, Amanda Temple and Jeremy Bolt, to all the supporting producers and the production teams on both sides of the Channel, particularly location managers, Geordie Devas in London, Jose Villalba and Antonin Depardieu in France. The film began in the UK with headquarters at Twickenham Studios housing such sets as the Vigo's Paris apartment or the Font Romeu sanatorium's x-ray room. One of London's oldest cinemas, the Electric on Portobello Road, housed the rowdy audience of A Propos de Nice and the former home of the Lithuanian Government became a living room in Nice. The magnificent Somerset House, London's first ever government office block in the Palladian style of the eighteenth century, served as a Paris hospital, the Fatman burned in its moat. The historic Price's Candle Factory in Battersea, south London, candle-maker since 1862 was where Jean and Lydu cast Ziro de Conduite and Lydu first met her mother-in-law at the London Zoo aquarium circa 1922. The Art Deco swimming pool situated in the basement of the nurses' home for London University College Hospital was the sanitorium pool, originally built in the 1920s as the staff hostel for Bourne & Hollingsworth's Oxford Street store. Royal Oak's St. Mary Magdalene Church's vault doubled as the bohemian Paris jazz club with the film's fee contributing to the upkeep of the church and local primary school. The pool at Widdlesfield Hospital, once a psychiatric institution and now a centre for learning disabilities, was used as a cineclub, and the National Film and Television School in Beaconsfield has one of the only period music studios in the UK. The Cafe Royal in Regent Street, sumptuous and dripping with luxury was where Jean and his gang met with a disparaging producer. Litoile at 30 Charlotte Street, Fitzrovia, became the Bohemians' restaurant, the haunt of many famous names over its hundred year history, including Francis Bacon, Ingrid Bergman, Elizabeth Taylor, to name a few. Hanworth Park House near Richmond was the final HQ when the film wrapped in March, 1997. The house, which is where Jean confronts his mother, Emily, was originally Henry V111's hunting lodge before it was burnt down. Built again as a private residence it later became a World War 1 military hospital, by 1929 it was the London Air park factory and airfield, home for the Graf Zeppelin and later a home for the elderly. The ideal would have been, of course, to shoot the whole film in France but because of cost it was more financially feasible to shoot half the film in the UK. The French locations were actually cut up into four parts. The first was the sanatorium in Font Romeu in the beautiful Pyrenees mountains, the actual sanatorium where Jean Vigo and Lydu Lozinska were patients and first met each other. The unit moved south to Nice to shoot the villa where the young Vigos live and where they have their wedding reception, a wonderful crumbling villa in Cap D'Ail, left abandoned because of the reputed ghost that lives there. The coastline for scenes with Jean and Lydu and the wonderful film set Jean is working on as an assistant and first meets Bonis Kaufman are all part of the beautiful Cap Ferrat area. 1he art department used many original cameras and equipment loaned from London's Museum of the Moving Image and Nice's Victorine Studios where Vigo first began his career. The Debrie camera body that Jean uses in Catching Fire is the same camera that shot Rex Ingram's 1921 film, The Four Horseman of the Apocalypse starring Rudolf Valentino. From Nice's promenade and the casino at Beaulieu Sur Mer where Jean and his team tried surreptitiously to shoot Apropos de Nice, the production moved to Nargis on the outskirts of Paris to shoot the LAtalante, barge sequences and the Villa St Cloud. On to the famous steps of Montmartre in Paris, and to the Canal St Denis where Jean shows Lydu the barge he has found for L'A talante. DIRECTOR - JULIEN TEMPLE It was Jean Vigo's ferocious honesty on film, in wanting to show the world in the way he saw it, which prompted Jullen Temple to become a director. I hadn't seen many films before", he says recalling his student days at Cambridge University in the seventies. "We projected Zero de Conduite off the roof of Kings College on to a sheet. We didn't have much room so we put the projector right on the edge of the building and we ran the film. It was the most marvellous and fantastic experience. I was so entranced that I didn't notice that the film wasn't spooled properly and the ejected stock was falling straight into the river. Two days later we were still drying the film with a hair-dryer. Julien Temple is a recorder of cultures and the music that they spawn and his films, although all very different, have a tongue-in-cheek non-conformity, combined with a passion for life, that always carries a certain dangerous edge. It is typical of him that while he was at the National Film School he became involved in the rise of punk music and culture in London and produced The Great Rock and Roll Swindle, featuring the Sex Pistols, which became his graduation thesis. The film was released world wide in 1980 and Daily Variety called it The Citizen Kane of rock movies. A highly sought after music video director, Temple has worked with the Rolling Stones, David Bowie, Nell Young, Whitney Houston, ZZ Top and many other top international recording artists. His unique visual style prompted John Powes of the L.A. Weekly to describe him as "one of the world's most talented film-makers". In 1982, Temple made The Secret Policemen's Other Ball starring John Cleese and Sting, among others. In the ensuing years, Temple directed the feature-length videos, Mantrap and Running Out of Luck starring Mick Jagger and Dennis Hopper. Temple's 1985 film, Absolute Beginners starring David Bowie, about the emergence of youth culture in the 50s was considered innovative in his use of music video techniques as a means of revitalising the movie musical. Temple's 1983 television feature, It's All True starring Orson Welles, Mel Brooks, Grace Jones and Ray Davies was awarded a gold medal at the New York Film and Television Festival. Temple made a contribution to the film, Aria - The Rigoletto Sequence starring Buck Henry, Beverly D'Angelo and Anita Morris, and in 1989, he directed Earth Girls Are Easy starring Gena Davis and Jim Carey, a comedy viewing California from an alien's point of view, which has become a favourite college campus cult film. MTV awarded Temple its highest accolade, The Video Vanguard of the Year. In 1989 Temple's video of Neil Young's This Note's For You received the MTV Video of the Year Award; bearing in mind that it was denied air-play due to the corporate controversy inherent in the video's content. He directed the first IMAX entertainment feature, At The Max featuring The Rolling Stones Steel Wheels tour in 1992.. His most recent film was Bullet starring Mickey Rourke and the late TuPac Shakur, about the true story of a family tom apart by three brothers consumed in a life of drugs and violence on the streets of New York. Temple with Amanda producing are developing the comedy, Wise Children based on the acclaimed novel by Angela Carter, Stick It based on the life of musician Buddy Rich, and a film based on the life of Elizabethan playwright, Christopher Marlowe. Temple is writing a film about the English poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, which he will also direct for the BBC. AMANDA TEMPLE - PRODUCER Catching Fire has been a difficult film to get off the ground and if it had not been for the tireless enthusiasm of Amanda and Julien Temple throughout and their determination to make it, it would probably never have seen the light of day. Amanda Temple began working as assistant to documentary director Karl Francis on his first TV feature, Gyro City for Channel Four; later becoming in-house production co-ordinator at the commercial company James Garrett and Partners and then at music video company, Midnight Films Ltd. Amanda and Julien Temple met when they were working together on Absolute Beginners and together they set up their own London-based production company, Nitrate Films Limited. In 1988, Amanda set up Nitrate Films Inc, with partners Julien Temple and Catherine Smith, a Los Angeles branch of the company producing high quality commercials, music videos and long forms. Nitrate also set up a feature film development division, with Amanda producing Temple's 'Rigoletto' sequence of Aria. Amanda Temple has produced and executive produced numerous award-winning music videos, concerts, TV specials and commercials for artists including, the Rolling Stones, Janet Jackson, David Bowie, Tom Petty, Neil Young and Whitney Houston. She executive produced Jesse Peretz's film First Love, Last Rites, based on a short story by lan McEwan, which has been selected for the Toronto Film Festival 1997. With Julien Temple directing and Amanda producing, they have the following films in development: Wise Children based on the acclaimed novel by Angela Carter, Stick It based on the life of musician Buddy Rich, and films based on the lives of Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe and English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. JEREMY BOLT - PRODUCER It was Jeremy Bolt who first showed Julien Temple Chris Ward's script, Love's a Revolution, because he had heard that Temple was a mega-Vigo fan. It was also Bolt, along with Amanda and Julien Temple, who remained convinced that Catching Fire would make a terrific film and stuck with it through all the changes over the next ten years, going from runner to producer of Mortal Kombat and Event Horizon, both big budget Hollywood films. 31-year-old Jeremy Bolt studied Philosophy and English at Bristol University. In 1988 Bolt joined film director Ken Russell as a runner, quickly becoming Assistant producer on The Lair of the White Worm and The Rainbow and then as Producer's Associate on Whore. By 1989, Bolt had set up his own production company, Impact Pictures with writer/director Paul Anderson producing music videos for artists such as Elton John and JJ Cale, and TV commercials for Saatchi & Saatchi. Bolt has worked in television drama throughout his career, first as Producer/Director on Salome, a 50-minute drama shot in Turkey for the National Film and Television School, with Ken Russell as Associate Producer on The Strange Affliction of Anton Bruckner for the South Bank Show. Finally, through Impact Pictures, Bolt produced Round the Block for Channel Four. In 1991, Bolt made his first independent film, The Big Fish with Channel Four and British Screen, directed by the renowned founders of Cheek By Jowl Theatre Company, Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod. Bolt went on to line produce, Turn of the Screw with Patsy Kensit and Julian Sands. In 1993, he founded the New Producers Alliance, which now has over 800 members, offering a new venue of networking for young British film-makers. Bolt produced Paul Anderson's Shopping, starring Sadie Frost, Jonathan Pryce, Sean Bean and Marianne Faithful, a controversial feature about joy-riding released in 1994. Bolt also produced Paul Anderson's Mortal Kombat based on the best-selling computer game and was producer of Gary Sinyor's spoof on Merchant Ivory, Stiff Upper Lips. Bolt and his partner director Paul Anderson have just completed Event Horizon, and their future film projects include the sci-fi feature The S
- Broadcaster:Channel 4
- Collection: Channel 4
- Genre:Feature Films
- Producer:Impact Nitrate Pictures LTD
- Transmission Date:16/05/2000
- Decade: 2000s