#Glenne headly making mr right undies movie

While painfully aware of the reception often afforded actors who decide to go into directing and the accompanying accusations of vaingloriousness, he refused to back down on anything in his version of the movie.

So you start on a weird set of negatives.' Whatever irritates you about political stories, thrillers, love stories, is what you don't want to do. I don't see the point of not making what I really want to make. 'For me to make a film costs me a fortune and an incredible amount of aggro. As a result, he decided that he would brook no compromise when it came to the finished article, an attitude that provided some colourful exchanges with his producer. He cites Costa-Gavras's State of Siege, Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers, the films of Francesco Rosi, and Andrzej Wajda's Ashes and Diamonds as sources of inspiration ? the kind of intelligent, questioning political thrillers that are rarely made today. The film has taken him three years to make longer if you count the pre-production gestation period. The question for me was: can you make someone very grey 'rootable'?' You have to find a way to make the grey compelling and that's very difficult because it's much simpler to make the issues black and white with someone to 'root' for. Nothing is that black and white - most of it operates within a grey area, morally and politically. Now it's always the little good guy against the big bad guy they're incredibly simple-minded. Films like this used to be satisfyingly intelligent. It's a love story, a political film and a thriller. I was essentially trying to make three films in one. I'm still tinkering and fiddling with it.

There is only one native English speaker. 'I shot it in English with Spanish and Portuguese actors.

#Glenne headly making mr right undies movie

In between acting gigs, he finds time to direct short films (two for fashion designer Bella Freud) and has just completed his long-gestating project, a movie of The Dancer Upstairs, based on Nicholas Shakespeare's fictionalised account of the search for Abimael Guzman, the enigmatic leader of the Peruvian terrorist revolutionary group, the Shining Path. Thus, he will flit to Europe to play Baron de Charlus in Raoul Ruiz's Time Regained, or return to the stage to appear in The Libertine. For some years now Malkovich has been able to operate in a manner that many actors would envy: he can command huge fees for an appearance in a Hollywood movie as a villain (In the Line of Fire, Con Air) without any damage to his credibility as an actor. To understand the nature of film-making at the time, Malkovich did extensive background reading. The concept allows for all manner of resonant digressions there is a mischievous take on the conflict between a demanding director and a difficult star, for example, and the brooding, infernal atmosphere of the film is reflected in the actual film-making. Malkovich, of course, plays Murnau, who becomes increasingly monomaniacal as his vampire bites and rampages out of control. Thus the unbelievably sinister Max Schreck - played with relish by a heavily made-up Willem Dafoe - starts feasting on the cast and crew. Malkovich's trick is to suggest that Murnau is so obsessed with authenticity that he hires a genuine vampire to play Nosferatu. Part satire, part reconstruction, part fantasy, it purportedly deals with the making of FW Murnau's ground-breaking silent classic, Nosferatu, of 1921, one of the greatest horror movies of all time. Shadow of the Vampire is a strange, fanciful film. Clearly, he feels sufficiently motivated on behalf of the film to put himself through the ringer just once. The only reason he's talking now - and 'talking' is a relative term for the attenuated, pause-laden susurrus that he employs for verbal communication - is to promote his latest film, Shadow of the Vampire, which has just been premiered at the Regus London Film Festival. It's been said that he detests journalists and interviews and the promotional circuit that accompanies films, but that's not true. The current conversation is not so much an interview as a continuing dialogue - though, in truth, I know little more about him by the end than I did when we first met.

It would be presumptuous to call him a friend, but we talk from time to time. He looks a little older than his 46 years, a retro-Victorian with a rakish air - like a cross between Henrik Ibsen and Indiana Jones in lecture mode. Such hair that he has curls around the edges of his collar, a perfect counterpoint to his currently well-developed beard. He is wearing a subtly checked three-piece tweed suit, a virgin white shirt and a perfectly knotted yellow and black tie.

New West End Company BRANDPOST | PAID CONTENTĮven at 10am in a distinctly soggy London, Malkovich is immaculately turned out.