Martin Scorsese began filming before being fired after a week: Leonard Kastle finally directed “The Honeymoon Killers”, his one and only feature film which will become a reference.
It’s not exactly a discovery. Shooting a film, in front of and/or behind the camera, is not always, far from it, a long, quiet river. The experience can even turn to the extreme, as was the case for Apocalypse Now, the Homeric filming of which is recounted in the mind-blowing making-of Heart of Darkness. Or Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo, and his conflicting relationship with his favorite actor Klaus Kinski.
Between painful and exhausting experiences, financial difficulties and endless journeys of the cross, the making of a feature film can even be the one and only experience of its author. For worse or for better. Here is the example of the Honeymoon Killers.
An authentic atrocious news item
Martha Beck is just a harmless, curvaceous nurse. At least until the day she responds to the matrimonial advert for “Lonely Hearts” by Raymond Fernandez, gigolo and marriage scammer. Now inseparable, linked by the same subversive passion, they roam the United States, trapping widows and single women to first rob them. Then brutally murder them…
The Honeymoon Killers is Inspired by an authentic atrocious news item in which the star couple was suspected of having killed up to twenty people, and was convicted of three murders, including that of a 2-year-old girl drowned in a sink. The evil couple will be executed at the famous Sing Sing Prison on March 8, 1951.
Roxanne
A whole day spent filming a beer can in a bush
The film was originally to be directed by Martin Scorsese, who was fired by producer Donald Volkman after a week because he was shooting only in long shots. Scorsese took his time. Too much. When the producer discovered he had spent an entire day filming a beer can in a bush, he was fired.
“They didn’t like the very complicated crane movements, the mind-boggling sequence shots that I had developed” Scorsese will tell. “Above all, I did not know how to explain to them what I was trying to do, probably because I was not ready for such an experience. In any case, Kastle should have taken care of the implementation from the start. scene since it was his script”.
Cult work appearing among the favorite films of François Truffaut and Michelangelo Antonioni, The Honeymoon Killers is a bit of the anti Bonnie and Clyde by Arthur Penn released two years earlier. Filmed in black and white documentary style, it is the sole production of Leonard Kastle.
Roxanne
A music composer at the helm
Far from film sets, the latter was especially renowned as a conductor and author of operas; he also had a great passion for the work of Gustav Mahler, and used extracts from his work in the film to nourish the soundtrack.
Although completely inexperienced, “I had the whole film in my head” he said in an interview given in 2003; “and the biggest part of the work was the scene rehearsals. We systematically rehearsed the scenes the day before filming, and also the same day. Shirley Stoler was extremely self-conscious about her weight, to the point that I kept telling her: “Listen, you’re not here because you’re fat, but because you’re a great actress!”
Adored by the critics but shunned by the public, the film caused Leonard Kastle to fall back into almost complete anonymity, who would resume his activity as a composer and teacher. He will attempt to return behind the camera several times, with several scripts under his belt.
Priest in love seeks mafioso boss
Including one, baptized The Wedding of Canawhich was to tell the story of a young homosexual priest who falls in love with a mafia boss in the 1970s. In 2001, Kastle was apparently ready to bring this project to fruition, on which he worked for years. years, before the financiers withdrew, causing it to collapse.
“I can always say that I never made a bad film after The Honeymoon Killers” Kastle slipped in an interview conducted in 2001 for the American film publisher Criterion.
There remains indeed this singular film, truly worth seeing, available on DVD / Blu-ray.