Driven by his own experiences with the Hollywood machine, Brit director Bernard Rose has created a damning look at life in Tinseltown with "ivans xtc"...
What made you adapt Tolstoy's "The Death of Ivan Ilyich"?
I shot this pretty straight adaptation of "Anna Karenina" [in 1997], and when I ran it for Warner Bros, they looked at听it and said, "Jeez, she cheats on her husband. She's so unsympathetic!" They then proceeded to put the film through the lawnmower, and, whatever bits were left on the floor, they picked up and stuck together in any order they felt like. What they ended up releasing is a travesty of the novel, and deserves to be put in the trash. Partly as an apology to Tolstoy, I embarked on "The Death of Ivan Ilyich".
Why did you decide to update the setting and听make Ivan a Hollywood agent?
If I had done it the way it's written, with Ivan as a bureaucrat in Tsarist Russia, I think it would have muted it. You'd just think, If he was living today, he'd have taken some antibiotics and got over it. But despite the fact that we do have all this modern medicine, no one's got out alive yet.
You made the film with the co-operation of the Hollywood talent agency CAA,听but they then disowned it. Why?
Part of the problem was that between us completing听"ivans xtc" and then screening it for buyers, this ex-agent of CAA, Jay Maloney, hung himself. He had actually been my agent and was somewhat similar to the character Danny [Huston] portrayed in the film, and they were appalled.
What was the effect of CAA's action?
It听made the film very听difficult to sell. It had the 'CAA lurgee', and people thought anyone who bought it would not be allowed to kiss Tom Cruise's arse again, or something like that.听But the more that they tried to stop us, the more determined we were to make sure that the film reached the market.
