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23° TORINO FILM FESTIVAL
Claude Chabrol

The Yards

The Yards

Country: USA
Year: 2000
Duration: 115'


Leo Handler, after serving time in prison, just wants to get his life back on track. He takes a new job with his highly connected and influential Uncle Frank and is reunited with his longtime friend, Willie Guitierrez and Willie’s girlfriend Erica. But he unwittingly drawn into a world of sabotage, high stakes pay-offs and even murder.
 
“I had been very fixated on Emile Zola’s La Bête Humaine and the Renoir film by the same title, and also Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers. I’d been very obsessed with what they call the verismo tradition in opera and I had wanted to do something similar. And it’s interesting because when you are doing something like that, you’re skating a fine line between melodrama and opera and it’s really a battle. My ambition was to make something operatic in that it was heavily emotional, but not sentimental. In fact, I played Puccini and Mascagni to all these people on the set for the actors as a way to inspire the performances.” (J. Gray)

Biography

film director

James Grey

James Gray (New York, USA, 1969) as a child growing up in Queens, New York. He attended film school at the University of Southern California. It was there that his student film Cowboys and Angels was first seen by producer Paul Webster, who encouraged Gray to write his first feature script. He made his first film Little Odessa (1994) at the age of twenty-four. The film, which starred Tim Roth, Vanessa Redgrave and Maximillian Schell, received critical acclaim and was the winner of the Venice Film Festival’s Silver Lion Award in 1994. Miramax Films released The Yards in fall of 2000. The film was selected for official competition at the 2000 Cannes International Film Festival. Currently, Gray is writing a film for Warner Bros., which he will direct.

FILMOGRAFIA

Little Odessa (id., 1994), The Yards (id., 2000).

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