geoffrey macnab - The Screengrab

Richard Kiel Chews the Fat

A poll once selected "Jaws", the steel-toothed assassin played by Richard Kiel in The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker, as the best-loved James Bond character, with 30% of the vote. Kiel is understandably proud of this fact, as well he might be, given the input he had in shaping the role. Speaking to Geoffrey Macnab, he recalls that Cubby Broccoli recruited him for the role with this pitch: ""The character we have in mind is going to have teeth like tools, maybe like a shark." (Maybe like a shark, and he's called "Jaws"? Does Kiel not know that there's a movie? Is it too late to tell him?) It turns out that Kiel hesitated to take the role because "He wanted to break away from rent-a-giant parts and play - as he puts it - 'regular henchman or villain roles'. However, he eventually managed to talk Broccoli into making Jaws a sympathetic, three-dimensional character rather than just a titan with gleaming metallic molars. 'If I was to play this role, I told him I'd want to give this character who kills people with his teeth a human side to make him more interesting, maybe have him be persevering and frustrated, so he wouldn't become boring. A guy killing people with his teeth could easily become over the top.'" After you've been in the business for a while, you become sensitive to these things.

Stupid Little Bastard Makes Film

In what may or may not be a testament to the state of the French film industry today, some of the most interesting movies out of France in recent years have been directed not by veteran filmmakers, but by movie neophytes taking their first shot at standing behind the camera after experiencing great success in other artistic media. Last year's highly praised The Diving Bell and the Butterfly was helmed by Julian Schnabel, generally known as a visual artist, and if The Possibility of an Island, the directorial debut of controversial novelist Michel Houllebecq turns out not to be one of the best movies of the year, it will at least be one of the most talked about.

The Possibility of an Island, based on a novel by Houllebecq himself in 2005, certainly has an intriguing enough concept: it reads like a disjointed surrealist take on science fiction -- a post-apocalyptic mash-up of A Boy and His Dog, Solaris and The Holy Mountain, with cloning and bikini contests thrown in for good measure. Whether or not it will actually succeed is another matter; thus far, critics have not been kind. The Guardian's Geoffrey MacNab sat down with Houllebecq to discuss the process of moviemaking, how it differs from writing, and whether or not he intends to contune on as a filmmaker. "Maybe it is a superficial motivation," he says of filming many of the movie's scenes in Andalucian Spain, "but I always go to the locations when I write a novel. In this case, some of the locations were so impressive that the idea for the film came frm that...I enjoyed the preparation of the movie. I mean, the period immediately before the shooting when you choose everything, all the details. When you create the world."

Tartan Fades To Black

One of the oldest and most respected independent distribution houses in the United Kingdom, Tartan Films, is taking down its shutter. Plagued by financial difficulties and distribution concerns, Tartan has closed down its offices, dismantled its American arm (Tartan Video USA), released all of its employees, and begun the process of selling off its highly respectable catalogue to other distributors. In recent years, Tartan had been best known for its "Asia Extreme" series, which brought movies like Oldboy and the original Japanese version of The Ring to the West, but the catalog of the 26-year-old company included everything from Bergman's Wild Strawberries to The Death of Mr. Lazarescu.