EXCLUSIVE: How Vincent Gallo Staged a Coup on the Set of His Next Film

Then again, that initial shoot was only the beginning. After filming finished on The Funeral Director that February, Gallo headed to Buenos Aires to shoot Francis Ford Coppola's Tetro. (By all accounts, those two had a much improved actor-director relationship.) When Gallo returned his attentions to the messy project he'd left behind, it wasn't Pete Red Sky's The Funeral Director anymore. Now, going forward, it would be Promises Written in Water, written and directed by Vincent Gallo.

Last year, as Tetro was released, Gallo began to talk about Promises, though he notably omitted its origins when The Independent synopsized the effort:

The film is about a beautiful young girl who is terminally ill. She decides not to go to the hospital or have treatment but to wait until the pain becomes unbearable - and then to end her life. Her one fear is what is going to happen to her body when she is dead. She wants to be cremated. She reaches out to a photographer she meets, asking him to make sure that her wish is fulfilled. He takes a job in a funeral home so that he has the experience to perform the cremation. It sounds morbid in the extreme. "What I have tried to do in this movie is to make choices as if this was the first movie ever made and not to buy into the story of what cinema should be," explains Gallo. This means making the film on the hoof, without much in the way of preparation.

"I shoot a bunch of stuff - improvs, things when people don't know they're being filmed. I look at the footage and separate it into filters. The first category is anything that is beautiful, photographically ... beautiful could be out of focus, it could be a mistake. Beautiful can be intentional. It can be just luck, it can be because the film is processed a little funnily ... Now, I take the film and start to look at the people in the film and I want them to be beautiful. Again, beauty is relative. Beauty can be beautiful ugly. It can be the back of their heads." [...]

Whether we'll ever get the chance to see Promises Written in Water is a moot point. Gallo made it for himself, not for the world at large. "I have no intention of expecting anyone to see it. I am so tuned into it that I can't imagine if it will have the same impact for someone else who doesn't know all the things I know."

As long as Gallo is satisfied with the film himself, he says that will be enough. "Don't take this the wrong way if you're going to write about it. I am giving zero attention to what the audience thinks. It's not that I resent them or don't care about them. I feel that if I am going to make my best work, I have to take that attitude ... I don't care if it ever gets released, I don't care if anyone ever likes it."

Then again, if Gallo had no plans to release it, would he have included its presumed 2010 release in the biography he submitted to the Tetro press notes, or spent a sizable chunk of his own money on reshoots? Cannes announcements will be coming fast and furious over the next week and Promises has been rumored for a sidebar berth; we'll see if the strange saga of this film will be revealing a new chapter soon.

[Photo Credit: Michael Buckner/WireImage]

The Funeral Director starring Vincent Gallo now filming [Quiet Earth]

Vincent Gallo's 'Promises Written in Water' Heading to Cannes [Ion Cinema via The Playlist]

The gall of Gallo: 'Talking to the press is sort of beneath me now' [The Independent]

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