Scenes : One Particular Scene From The Limey directed by Stephen Soderbergh +++ some jumbled narrative techniques
Says Terry Stamp, who plays Wilson in the 1999 film, The Limey, "There were these scenes, let's call them
7, 8 and 9. And those were three big dialogue scenes between the Lesley Anne Warren character and myself in three
different locations. Let's say the first one was in her apartment and we did that, and he shot it. Then, we thought,
oh, we're going home. And Stephen said, 'Oh, you know that scene 8? Where you're on the waterfront?' And we said,
'Yeah.' He said, 'Do you know that?' We said, 'Well, yeah.' He said, 'Well, could we just do it now?' And I was
so up for him, he's given me the break of a lifetime, and I said, 'Sure, I can do that.' And Lesley Anne said,
'Whu, whu, yeah, I suppose we could.' Then she'd go to me (furtively), 'Why's he doing this?' And I said, 'Don't
worry about this, you know the words, we'll do it.' 'How should we do it?' 'We'll do it like it's written in there.'
So he shot. And then he said, 'You know that scene no. 9, when you're in the cafe? Do you know that? Could you
do that?' And as it was mostly my dialogue and I learned the whole film -- I don't mess around -- I said, 'Yeah
I could do that.' And Lesley Anne said (whispery), 'What's he doing? What's he doing?' I said, 'Don't worry about
it.' And we shoot it. She's on the phone: 'What's he doing? I don't understand what he's doing.' And I said, 'I
don't understand what he's doing, but I don't care. We're working for the greatest director in America, what do
you care what he's doing? Do we trust him or not? I don't have to know what he's doing.'"
So, what's being discussed is a particular scene in The Limey, in which Wilson and the Lesley-Anne Warren character
have the identical conversation in 3 different places - in a restaurant, on the phone, and walking along the waterfront
harbour area. The dialogue flows seamlessly, while the screen flips through the 3 areas. Which of course, doesn't
make sense, or does it?
"It makes memory sense," says the director Stephen Soderbergh. "That walk-and-talk scene is one
of my favourite things in the movie and it's an idea that I'd always wanted to do, and something I felt could work
even though it makes absolutely no sense. And I'm amazed that people sit there... and they take it. I think because
… it should feel like something that's remembered. Here's a guy who remembers, 'I had a long conversation with
this woman and we went to these different places but I can't remember which parts were where,' and I just took
that idea. It was very disorienting for Lesley Anne, because we shot the entire scene in three different locations
with different blockings. So it was like six sets of the scene, and I was grinding a lot of footage. Terence told
me later she kept going up to him and saying, 'What is he doing? I am so confused.' Terence would just say, take
it easy, I'm sure he has a plan. And then she saw the film and said, oh I see. But it was so counterintuitive to
her, she was really taken aback."
"So when we get to scene 8, we do scene 8," says Stamp. "And he says, 'Do you think you could also
do scene 7 while you're on the waterfront? Do you think you could do scene 9?" So, in the end, we've got these
three scenes each shot in three locations so I can't imagine what he's doing. I knew he wanted to expand the episodic
time concept, but it was beyond my wildest dreams, really. It was just so elegant, sparse and wonderful. I thought
it was like a perfect film. And Lesley Anne Warren was on the phone to me, 'Oh no, this was cut and this was cut.'
And I said, 'Listen, it's perfect, how much more painful must it have been for him knowing what wonderful things
he was cutting.' You can't complain when a movie is great, and that's what I felt. He got what he intended to do
and the film had manifested to him as he was shooting, it was showing itself to him."
"There were a lot of things like that in the film," says Soderbergh, "Ideas that I'd wanted to try,
and this movie seemed like the good skeleton to hang them on. I think the crime genre is the perfect one to inject
with your own aesthetic preoccupations because it can hold it. The spine is so solid that you can digress and abstract
things and never lose people."
A very brilliant and strikingly original bit of cinematic sampling comes in The Limey. There's a little known 1967
British movie called Poor Cow, starring Terry Stamp as a young man. "It's this Ken Loach movie," says
Soderbergh, "which I'd never seen. Lem sent me over this fifth-generation tape he had and I just went, oh
God, that's gonna be amazing. Because the whole documentary style that Loach uses was perfect, it just looked like
someone was following Terence around London. And then to see him, God, he was beautiful. He still is, but Jesus,
he was just astonishing."
So, Soderbergh uses the footage from Poor Cow to recall Wilson's earlier life in London with his young wife and
daughter - rather than someone else's film - they act as fragments of memory that appear throughout the movie as
projections of Wilson's imagination.
In terms of editing decisions, another unique choice Soderbergh made was to leave the violence off-screen. "My
approach to violence in movies is that it should be unappealing, it should be not pleasant, and it should be very
abrupt," says Soderbergh. "It shouldn't look pretty and it shouldn't be lingered on. That's the only
thing that I keep in mind." As for the warehouse scene with Wilson at his most savage: "It was written
in the script: he goes back into the warehouse and we stay outside. Which I thought was absolutely the way to do
it. It was much better to hear it, and then he comes out and he's got blood on his face and the image you get...
you get it. I think you've got to be careful about that stuff. I always have. In my movies, when there's been violence,
they've always been like that. Other filmmakers, I don't know. Sometimes I see a film and I can tell that they're
digging it. Because those things are hard to shoot and you only spend time on things you like, so I can tell in
a film when a director digs this shit and it makes me uncomfortable. I go, oof, he's into this. You don't spend
all that time on that stuff unless you're into it and that always makes me uneasy."
Then, there's the two '60s icons, Peter Fonda and Terry Stamp, who don't belong in a movie together. Two very different
kinds of anachronisms. "They've never left the periods that they began in," says Soderbergh. "That's
what I loved about it. Wow, two completely different worlds, yet with a similar kind of baggage. Both guys who
kind of march to their own beat and retained a certain kind of integrity about who they are. I know when we went
to Artisan to pitch it and I said, Terence and Peter. They said, 'Oh yeah.' The image of those two helmets on a
battlefield facing each other is really interesting."
"The press (in its reviews of The Limey) in general has been pretty good," says Soderbergh. "But
when we were in Cannes, we got the most scathing review I've ever gotten in my career from a guy in the Hollywood
Reporter. We were laughing at it: 'Holy shit!' He said it's 15 minutes of plot stretched out to 90 minutes. And
I thought.... yeah. That describes every European art film I've ever loved. That's exactly what we're doing. That's
why I felt the story had to be so simple because if it were any more complicated, the explosion of the narrative,
people wouldn't be able to sit through it. They have to be confident that it will return to what they're familiar
with."
What I remember about the Limey is the Poor Cow sampling and the mixed-up conversation scene. These scenes come
from the memory of Wilson as he sits on the airplane, returning to London, the purpose of his mission to Los Angeles
accomplished. But why didn't Soderbergh construct the entire film from fragments of Wilson's memory? That would
have been truly amazing - instead, I feel like it only went half the distance. But then, it's truly the paradox
of a good movie that we actually want to get into the editing room and cut a better version - whereas, other movies
we'd sooner just forget about.
(By Donald Anderson, based on original interviews with Stephen Soderbergh and Terence Stamp conducted by Jason
Anderson)
ADDENDUM: Outta Sight and the possibility of a Wong Kar-Wai influence?
In a top ten list of cinematic seduction scenes, you'd definitely want to include the scene where the characters
of George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez get together in Outta Sight. Earlier in the movie, there's a scene with Lopez
and Clooney brought together in the trunk of a car. The space is so confined, naturally - but it brings you deeper
into the movie. It's like a foreshadow to the later pillow talk, except what's unique is that when Lopez's character
is talking, there's an intimacy to the film and lighting, that makes the viewer (at least in my case) feel that
the other head pillow is their own. So, later, the Lopez character, a police officer, sits in a Detroit hotel bar
- the snow falls thick beyond the window where the city lights spread out beautifully. Two businessmen try to pick
her up, and then the George Clooney character, a bank robber, the one she's in pursuit of, for lust and for law,
comes on the scene. They pretend for a moment to never have met, indulging a fantasy of whether or not they could
be together if they just met on the street, like normal people, and not on opposite sides of the law ... Okay,
okay … so you're thinking - how could this possibly be the greatest seduction scene? It's because of how Soderbergh
cuts it up. As the dialogue is unfolding, the screen image is flashing forward to the later stages of seduction
… I mean, I can't make it sound so amazing in text, but it's breathtaking on the screen.
This seduction scene technique might remind you of something from a film by Hong Kong director Wong Kar-Wai. There's
a scene in the 1990 film, Days of Being Wild - amidst a soundtrack of Hawaiian music and a 1960s Hong Kong, in
which humidity drips from the screen -- the Leslie Cheung character seduces the Maggie Cheung character. The dreamy
dialogue mixed with voiceover - "Give me one minute of your time?" "And the minute becomes an hour,
and then it becomes every afternoon" - suddenly, magically finds them in bed, post-sex. Apparently, the director
made them do 53 takes, cause he wanted them to overcome by the heat, which of course the actors were. Cinematographer
Christoper Doyle says, "Maggie Cheung used to hate me, because we took two days and 53 takes to do the love
scene. Actually, after she gets into bed with the guy, because of this line, 'Give me one minute of your time,'
and then it becomes an afternoon, and then you see them in bed together. And that was originally shot in one very
long take. In the film, it's cut into several sections. There's quite a number of takes in there."
"I ran into this guy the other day. He said, 'Heere, I was inna, Miami, at the Disney, and I come out and
there's like FUCKING Pamela Anderson there, and I said, hallo, I'm a friend of Terry Stamp, can I have my picture
taken wit yooo.' I thought, my God, that must've frightened her out of her life."
Terence Stamp talks about his role as Wilson in The Limey, Directed by Stephen Soderbergh
"I was in Hawaii on holiday, living on the beach, my agent got the message to me about him wanting to talk
to me. I got a lift into town, phoned him on a public phone, imagining he was gonna offer me some cameo part as
an English sadist, and he starts rapping me this story. 'You know this film, Poor Cow, I'm gonna use footage and
get rights, blah, blah.' I was just flabbergasted. I hadn't thought about Poor Cow for 25 years.
"I had to view it because I had to remember the voice I'd used, remember the movement pattern that I'd used
and I had to kind of tether the Limey to the young Dave Wilson, there had to be a certain continuity, albeit with
a lot of patina. The voice had to be aged, the movement had to be compounded by living in a cell, those technical
things.
"(In prison) Wilson has amassed this huge shell for protection. He's not like a Bruce Willis or a Sylvester
Stallone or a Victor Mature. He's survived prison, he hasn't been broken by prison, but how would a guy who's lean,
like a greyhound, with nowhere to run -- how has he survived prison? And I figured that he, if a guy with a razor
blade comes upon the sleeping Wilson, hoping to cut his lungs out, he's at a disadvantage, because Wilson's never
that asleep. The fact that that guy believes Wilson is asleep gives Wilson a tremendous advantage. In that sense
he's a con, an ex-con, but he's like a Zen monk. He's at one with himself, his mind never drifts off. He always
has an aura of awareness. He's a guy who's always in the moment. He goes through L.A. like it's butter. I had to
summon up as much awareness as I've ever been called up for a role.
"Point Blank is one of my favourite movies, so when Stephen told me, I'm gonna make a kind of Point Blank,
I was in heaven. I figured what made Lee Marvin so ominous was that his lowest tension was his highest intensity.
So I thought, that's how Wilson has to be. He has to be totally relaxed and totally coiled all the time. When he
explodes, when he kills the three guys, that's the only time you see him boiling over. That's the very frightening
aspect. I really like the fact people are sympathetic to him. In his mind, the kind of politicians, the people
who make genetically altered foods, are cowards, they're criminals within the law. He's the real thing. He's not
a corrupt policeman or a corrupt policeman. He dances to his own drum. And I think that's very attractive because
it's how we'd all like to be. It's just that life pushes us out of shape, takes us away from ourselves. So any
guy who stays close to that, you can feel empathy for that. Because we've all had moments where that was true."
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