Country: USA
Year: 1985
Duration: 88'


"Somebody brought my attention to Siegfried Lenzs book, and I thought there was great potential there for a film. There are similarities to Joseph Conrad's Victory, which is something I've always wanted to do. Maybe the geographical situation of Poland makes people specialists in those kinds of issues. Victory has been a project of mine for fifteen, twenty years now, so in a way I could make use of the Conradian philosophy which I'd been accumulating on The Lightship. Robert Duvall is almost like Mr. Jones in Victory, although Lenz had already described that character pretty well. I suppose the project was brought to me because I have the reputation of being an expert in that kind of claustrophobic situation, where characters are locked into some kind of game. Also it was an ideal subject for my first American movie. The sea looks the same everywhere, so I didn't have any headaches about the background or the reality which I may not have known well enough to control. The seamen are also pretty universal characters." (Jerzy Skolimowski, "Monthly Film Bulletin", May 1986)

"Caspary's is a personality so shifting, so unsettling, so protean that he is as he himself acknowledges halfway to total negation, to death itself. He is the terminal extreme of Skolimowski's own restlessness. Miller resists him, and insists on keeping his ship in place constantly rocking at its anchor without really moving al all. It is a brilliant existential duel, one of the finest exchanges in the long history of 'Doppelganiger' cinema." (Richard Combs, Riti di passaggio, in Jerzy Skolimowski, Lindau, Torino 1996)

Biography

film director

Jerzy Skolimowski

(Lodz, Poland, 1938), director, screenwriter, producer, and actor, after inconsistent studies and experience as a boxer and a poet, became involved in cinema thanks to Andrzej Wajda, who encouraged him to enroll in the film school in Lodz. With Polanski, he wrote the screenplay for Knife in the Water (1962) and he debuted as a director with Rysopis (1964), which, with his next film Walk over (1965), made him one of the major exponents of the international Nouvelle Vague of the 1960s. In 1967, his film The Departure won the Golden Bear in Berlin but that same year another movie of his, Hands Up!, was censored (it was released only in 1981) and he never made another movie in his home country. Skolimowski's international career is full of risky production adventures and great masterpieces and spans various countries (Czechoslovakia, Italy, Germany, England, the United States). After the failure of King, Queen, Knave, he spent a great deal of inactive time in England and Poland, followed by the great success of his English movies The Shout (1978) and Moonlighting (1982). In 1985, he directed his first all-American movie, Lightship and he moved to the US. After returning to his homeland, in 1991 he directed his first Polish movie after Hands Up!, 30 Door Key and over the years continued to work in cinema, writing and producing the film by his two sons Józef and Michal, The Hollow Men (1993). After a long hiatus from film, he returned to directing movies in 2008 with Four Nights with Anna, presented at the Quinzaine des réalisateurs in Cannes, followed by Essential Killing (2010), Special Jury Prize in Venice; 11 Minutes (2015); and EO (2022), the Jury Prize in Cannes.

FILMOGRAFIA

Rysopis (Rysopis - Segni particolari nessuno, 1964), Walkover (1965), Bariera (Barriera, 1966), Le Départ (Il vergine, 1967), The Adventures of Gerard (Le avventure di Gerard, 1970), Deep End (La ragazza del bagno pubblico, 1970), König, Dame, Bube (Un ospite gradito... per mia moglie, 1972), The Shout (L'australiano, 1978), Ręce do gory (Mani in alto, 1981), Moonlighting (Moonlighting - Cittadini di nessuno, 1982), Success Is the Best Revenge (Il successo ad ogni costo, 1984), The Lightship (Lightship - La nave faro, 1985), Torrents of Spring (Acque di primavera, 1989), Thirty Door Key/Ferdydurke (1991), Cztery noce z Anną (Quattro notti con Anna, 2008), Essential Killing (id. 2010), 11 minut (11 Minutes, 2015), EO (2022).

Cast

& Credits

Director: Jerzy Skolimowski.
Screenplay: William Mai, David Taylor, dal romanzo di Siegfried Lenz.
Supervisione della sceneggiatura: Kerstin Schwarburg.
Collaborazione alla sceneggiatura: Robert Dunn e Jerzy Skolimowski (non accreditati).
Director of photography: Charly Steinberger.
Operatore seconda unit`: Gernot Koehler.
Editor: Barrie Vince.
Music: Stanley Myers.
Musica elettronica aggiunta: Hans Zimmer, Scott Hancock.
Cast and characters: Robert Duvall (Calvin Caspary), Klaus Maria Brandauer (Capitano Miller), Michael Lyndon (Alex), Tom Bower (Coop), Robert Costanzo (Stump), Badia Diola (Nate), William Forsythe (Eugene Waxler), Tim Phillips (Thorne).
Production company: Moritz Borman e Bill Benenson per CBS Productions.
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