Unmaking movies – part one

The big screen output of the world's best directors may have been dissected and analysed ad infinitum, but a fresh perspective on their artistic oeuvre can often be gleaned from taking a look at their 'lost works' – those projects that were toyed with, developed, and in certain cases even partially filmed, before ultimately collapsing. Paul Martin speculates on some movies that might have been.

The film business is a terrifyingly arcane one. Attempting to fathom why one picture strikes box-office gold, why another becomes a critical smasheroo, and why a third flops like a pancake made by Dick Fosbury is an analytical odyssey likely to prove every bit as time-consuming and ultimately fruitless as that devastating final scenario depicted in Roger Hargreaves' Mr. Rush, when the title character is abandoned to count the grains of sand on a beach, in the hopeless manner of some blue, triangular incarnation of Sisyphus. By way of illustration, please take Matthew McConaughey (I don't care where, just get him the hell away from me! Chortle! Snigger! Guffaw!). His movies consistently fail to deliver enough decent bits to even pad out a two minute trailer, and yet they mysteriously manage – like an awful cinematic Bermuda Triangle - to suck in disturbingly vast quantities of audience coin. How? Why? We simply don't know.

Yet, in spite of such imponderable riddles, we film fans still love to embroil ourselves in the brouhaha that precedes the release of each new movie. We like to cast a discerning eye over the story material, the attached creative personnel, and make a solemn judgement on whether the finished feature is going to soar like an eagle or sink like an out of shape buffalo going for a swim straight after a big lunch. For example, movie geeks are currently going a bundle over the prospect of director Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead, TV's Spaced) applying his fast-cutting brand of pop culturally literate movie-making to an adaptation of Bryan Lee O'Malley's fast-moving, pop culturally literate comic strip Scott Pilgrim. You can practically hear the antecedent drooling any time you read an online news item about Wright's forthcoming flick. In contrast, the news that Da Vinci Code helmer Ron Howard is making goo-goo eyes at graphic novel The Strange Adventures of H. P. Lovecraft has been far less warmly received, with any possible fusion between the perceived crass commercialism of Richie Cunningham and revered oddball author (and part-time racist) Lovecraft being resolutely seen as a very bad thing indeed.

So x director plus y source property equals z level of excitement amongst us film anoraks, with the degree of anticipation being contingent on the perceived merits of the two formers, as well as their apparent suitability as a pairing. Often though the prospective movies that hold the greatest allure for cinephiles are, somewhat perversely, the ones that never even made it as far as the multiplex. The ones that long ago passed into the realm of cinematic folklore, but which are so exciting and so evocative as to still possess the power to set hearts aflutter at their mere mention. Gold-plated tales which seemed certain to deliver epoch-wedgieingly brilliant movies, but that – for a variety of reasons, as we shall see – ultimately slipped through the fingers of some of the planet's finest film-makers. These are the ones that got away.

Just such a project is the subject matter for Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno, a documentary by Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea which was released theatrically in the UK in November 2009. Best known as the director of thrillers Les Diaboliques and The Wages of Fear, Clouzot is often characterised as the French master of suspense, an Auguste Dupin to Hitchcock's Sherlock Holmes (the regular comparisons between the two being heightened by the fact that both Les Diaboliques and Vertigo emanated from novels by the Boileau-Narcejac writing duo). However that tag is somewhat misleading. For while Clouzot was undeniably skilled in eking every last drop of tension from each frame of his movies, his real thematic obsession was the potential extremes of human emotion. This fascination with people operating outside the confines of normal, civilised behaviour is evident in the fatalistic determination of the truck drivers ferrying nitroglycerine across the South American mountains in The Wages of Fear, as well as in the multi-layered connivances of the protagonists in Les Diaboliques, and it too can be discerned in the story that Clouzot wished to tell with Inferno – that aborted production from 1964 having centred on the lunacy sired in a husband when he suspects his young wife of having multiple affairs.

Bromberg and Medrea's documentary struggles to fully get to grips with the myriad problems which preceded the final collapse of Inferno (the already-limping shoot was completely derailed when Clouzot suffered a heart attack while working on location with female star Romy Schneider). There is discussion of Clouzot's strained relations with his actors (male lead Serge Reggiani stormed out after a week of principal photography), the interminably slow pace at which filming was proceeding, and the autocratic manner in which the writer-director was running the shoot (Columbia had granted him both an unlimited budget and creative carte blanche), without any real analysis as to what the underlying causes of these problems were. One thing that is made abundantly clear however, is that Inferno had the potential to be the crowning masterpiece of Clouzot's career.

That is the inescapable assessment facilitated by Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno, much of which is made up of remarkable footage shot by the director himself, either on location or as preparatory tests ahead of production. Inspired by the originality of Fellini's 8½, Clouzot set himself the task of giving visual interpretation to the spiralling mental anguish of his central character Marcel (the role initially filled by Reggiani). So while the everyday drama between Marcel and Schneider's Odette was to be photographed in black and white, the sequences that elucidated the fears and fantasies of the former shifted into colour (akin to the stark divide between the afterlife and the earth presented in Powell and Pressburger's A Matter of Life and Death). And in these latter sequences (and what exists still in his test footage) Clouzot plotted a near-psychedelic sensory overload, drawing influences from 1960s kinetic art and 1920s German expressionist cinema alike. Camera effects see time split, reversed, sped up, and colours and lighting are nauseatingly warped, giving a demonic flavour to otherwise innocuous scenes, as well as the usually angelic-looking Odette. There is a hint of Spellbound's famed Salvador Dalí-designed delusions in the footage shot by Clouzot (again the Frenchman finds himself mentioned in connection to a Hitchcock work), with the sheer level of artistry evident putting both films at a certain remove from any literal expression of the individual subconscious. Yet, thanks to its conceptual ambition and fascinating formal experiments, Inferno does appear as if it would have made for compelling viewing.

Inferno might not have ever made it into as far as the darkened recesses of the movie house, but one flick which did slay 'em at the theatres in 1964 was Goldfinger - for many folks still the definitive cinematic distillation of the James Bond formula. The ensuing years were not always kind to Commander Bond however, with his generally ultra-loyal public occasionally exhibiting signs of weariness with his schoolboy antics. As was the case following 2002's dire Die Another Day, when Bond producers EON found themselves casting around for a new direction in which to take their franchise. Enter confirmed pulp paperback fan Quentin Tarantino, to suggest he helm a version of the first Ian Fleming book to star 007, Casino Royale. Tarantino's plan was to apparently retain Pierce Brosnan as the anachronistic super-spy and pick his story up directly where 1969's On Her Majesty's Secret Service left off, with Bond devastated over the murder of new bride Tracy. Blinded with grief, Bond would have then stumbled headlong into his tumultuous affair with Vesper Lynd, leading on to all those naughty double-crosses. Perhaps sensing a QT Bond would be more about the former than the latter, EON passed on his offer, though they did manage to piss off the rapid-yakking auteur by promptly putting the suggested Casino Royale into production as the next 007 outing.

Bond is not the only secret agent material Tarantino has flirted with over the years, as the Reservoir Dogs director was also long-linked to a Modesty Blaise movie. Created by writer Peter O'Donnell and subject of a high camp portrayal starring Monica Vitti and Terence Stamp in 1966, Modesty is a former international crime boss who carries out assignments for MI6 in conjunction with her knife-chucking cockney sidekick Willie Garvin. But although there are discernible elements of the ultra-resourceful Modesty in Kill Bill's Bride, Tarantino's interest in O'Donnell's character never actually got beyond handing Vincent Vega a copy of MB novel I, Lucifer to read on the crapper in Pulp Fiction, and lending his name to the oh-so catchily-titled straight-to-DVD outing Quentin Tarantino Presents My Name is Modesty: A Modesty Blaise Adventure, directed by Scott Speigel of supermarket slasher Intruder er, fame.

Tune in on Thursday for Part Two of Unmaking Movies, in which Alejandro Jodorowsky attempts to create sci-fi history with his version of Dune, David Cronenberg wants to forget all about Total Recall, and Umberto Eco unwittingly snubs Stanley Kubrick over Foucault's Pendulum.