'A western is what I really wanted’
Martin Koolhoven, director
Hollywood picked up the script of Koolhoven’s western ‘Brimstone. ‘I have no idea how it all works there.’
How do you become the hottest thing in Hollywood? Director Martin Koolhoven (45) managed to accomplish that last fall, when de right people read the script of his western thriller ‘Brimstone’. “I then heard: go sit by your phone. this is going to explode within a week’, says Koolhoven. ‘It turned out to happen in just a few days.’
This month his business partner, Els Vandevorst will be pulling in the last financiers at the Berlinale, the filmfestival of Berlin, with some big casting names. When last weekend the news was released that teen idol Robert Pattinson was taking part in the Brimstone, Koolhoven got a few hundred ‘rather abundant’ twitter followers extra.
Pattinson, known for his part as the swoon worthy vampire Edward Cullen from the Twilight saga, plays the part of an outlaw in ‘just one of the 4 chapters’ of Brimstone according to Koolhoven: the lead parts are for Mia Wasikowska (Alice in Wonderland, Maps to the Stars) and Guy Pearce, which had his breakthrough in 2000 as a murderer without a short term memory in Memento, and is particularly favored to cast as a movie villain.
Carice van Houten will also have a part in the movie, and soon Koolhoven will cast more Dutch actors. He’s thinking of about seventy shooting days in may, june and july on location in Canada and Europe. Koolhoven: ‘Guy is already working with a dialect coach. and Mia will soon be starting with learning sign language.’ He thinks the budget of 10 million Euros will be reachable ‘with this cast in Hollywood, but I definitely want to keep control of the final cut of the movie.’
Brimstone will be the first movie by Koolhoven since Oorlogswinter (Winter of War), which had almost 840.000 viewers in 2008 and was even noticed abroad. In the last 7 years Koolhoven made 5 movies and a tv-movie, varying from the arthouse movie Amnesia to the multicultural ‘Het Schnitzelparadijs’. ‘After that I got offered all kinds of things, one of them a British romantic comedy. I could continue to ‘mess around’, but I asked myself: what do I really want? And that was a western.’
You don’t shoot a western in Drunen [NL]: it had to be an international production. Searching through available western scripts, Koolhoven found a western comedy – ‘a bit of Tarantino – style’ – which he kind of liked. But during the year of rewriting he grew tired of the ‘postmodern’ style of the script and started thinking of writing his own. ‘I love spaghetti westerns. During the 60’s they were thought of as more realistic, but that didn’t make them unique. They were steamy and violent, but most of all Italian. When I’m making a western, there should be a Dutch angle to it ofcourse.’
The result, after 3 years of writing, was Brimstone, about a woman who at the end of the 19th century is haunted by an obsessed priest in the Wild West. Of the reformed kind? Koolhoven was raised as a protestant; wife Tallulah Schwab made her debut last year in the refo-movie Dorsvloer vol confetti. Koolhoven: ‘I don’t want to say much more about it. It’s a completely different kind of western story than you’re used to.’
The time is right for Westerns in Hollywood right now, after the success of movies like True Grit by the Coen brothers and Django Unchained by Tarantino. European-american western hybrids are popular as well: think of movies like the Austrian Das Finsterne Tal or the Danish The Salvation. Koolhoven: ‘Most important was that the people were going to read my script. I needed help with that. I had no idea how it all worked in Holywood and my name doesn’t mean a lot there [yet].’
Producer Nik Powell advised him to take on an English casting director en suggested a few names. He went with Des Hamilton, who recently casted movies of Andrea Arnold (Wuthering Heights), Lars von Trier (Nymphomaniac) and Nicolas Winding Refn (Only God Forgives). After that it all went very fast.
In november the buzz started. Koolhoven: ‘Des was enthusiastic, the script started a buzz in Hollywood. Guy Pearce really wanted the part. An amazing actor, and it really helps that everyone enjoys working with him. He knows Pattinson from The Rover, and Pattinson again knows Wasikowska from Maps to the Stars. Not that that’s why I chose them, but they’re all very down to earth. At the end you are in each others space for a few months in the middle of nowhere.’
And now? ‘ After Brimstone there are probably four more hypes buzzing around in Hollywood already. I’m simply going to make a movie.’
source | translation by 'Thinking of Rob'
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