It has taken San Francisco based
filmmaking partners Scott McGehee (he’s gay) and David Siegel (and he’s not)
over fifteen years to turn out four films – their weird 1994 thinking man’s
horror debut Suture; their gay kid in trouble with a bathhouse mob boss,
who’s saved by his very focused mom, The Deep End; their crack at
filming a quality bestseller with a star laden cast, Bee Season; and now
(opening Friday at the Roxie) their lovers on the lam New York thriller and
just possibly their breakout hit, Uncertainty.
|
|
Kicking off as two lovely twenty-somethings:
Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Bobby) and Lynn Collins (Kate) ponder whether to spend
their precious day together with her extended clan in Brooklyn or footloose and
free in Manhattan. The filmmakers decide to show us both choices, running as
parallel films – one sort of domestic with familial angst mixed in (the green
film) and the other mostly melodrama as our couple flees foreign mobsters (the
yellow film) after Bobby finds a cell phone. Plotted by the writer/co-directors
with dialogue significantly improvised by the actors, Uncertainty upends
romantic and nourish clichés while escaping the worse fate of being too smarty
pants experimental. After a wild and breathtaking spin through the Gotham
subways, the couple go to the police only to confront the NYPD’s version of the
“rude waiter” helpful, but only on his own terms desk sergeant.
“We just found this in the back of
a cab. We’ve been followed, we’ve been chased.
“We witnessed a murder.”
“You witnessed a murder? You’re
going to need to speak to Sgt. Hill. He’s not here, so what you need to do is
sit on these benches, when he gets back in, he’ll talk to you.”
“Can we leave this with you?”
“No.”
“It’s not ours.”
“It’s not mine either, Honey.”
“Don’t call her Honey!”
“Whoa! Take your phone and sit
down and relax.”
|
|
|
David Siegel
|
Co-director David Siegel sat down
with BAR recently to explain the joy of working with wunderkind actor Joseph
Gordon-Leavitt. Sigel calls Gordon-Leavitt very much a thinking man’s
actor and credited him with creating one of the film’s most eloquent
mini-monologues.
Lamble: There’s an erotic tension – Joe takes his
shirt off. How was the lovemaking different between the green and yellow films?
Siegel: That was a big question – what was lovemaking
for each couple (in each different story) and time of the day. We knew we
wanted the lovemaking to intertwine each story – so there was a lot of
conversation about the energy and the sort of desperate need to hold each other.