(Cover) - EN Movies - Guillaume Canet “learnt a lot” from working with James Gray.
The French actor-turned-writer-and-director teamed up with the award-winning scribe on upcoming movie Blood Ties - a surprise collaboration for Canet considering Gray had never written for anyone other than himself before.
However, their instant connection and respect for each other’s previous work paved the way for the creative partnership.
“One day, I got a phone call from my French agent saying that James Gray was in Paris and he wished to meet me after he’d seen and enjoyed Tell No One. We had lunch together and right away I had this weird feeling that I had known him for 20 years,” Canet recalled to Flicks and Bits. “A few months later, I ran into him at the Cannes Film Festival where he was a jury member. At that time the project of a remake of Blood Ties was shaping up and I was looking for a screenwriter with whom to co-write the film, someone who could set the story in New York in the ‘70s. I asked James if he knew of any possible candidates and his answer was brief and surprising, ‘Me!’”
Guillaume also explained how he transformed the French original, Les liens du sang, into an American movie.
Having starred in the 2008 film, the established French actor wanted to stick closely to the original script but had to compromise on the size of his cast to be able to create a well thought out backstory for each character.
“I wanted to stick to the storyline and I cut down on the number of characters in order to focus on a more in-depth analysis of some. Let me take an example: I wanted the girlfriend of the cop played by Billy Crudup to be African American. And I assumed that their love story – before they split up and were reunited again later on – dated back to the ‘60s with all the issues raised by such a relationship between a white man and a black woman in those days. This kind of detail allowed me to ‘Americanise’ my story,” he said.
