{"id":37759,"date":"2006-01-05T08:04:17","date_gmt":"2006-01-05T13:04:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.filmbuffonline.com\/FBOLNewsreel\/wordpress\/?p=37759"},"modified":"2016-01-31T21:08:47","modified_gmt":"2016-02-01T02:08:47","slug":"hitman-on-the-verge-of-a-nervous-breakdown-writerdirector-richard-shepard-talks-about-the-matador","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.filmbuffonline.com\/FBOLNewsreel\/wordpress\/2006\/01\/05\/hitman-on-the-verge-of-a-nervous-breakdown-writerdirector-richard-shepard-talks-about-the-matador\/","title":{"rendered":"Hitman On The Verge Of A Nervous Breakdown: Writer\/Director Richard Shepard Talks About THE MATADOR"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>It sounds like the set up to a Borscht Belt comedian\u2019s routine. \u201cA hitman and a traveling businessman walk into a bar\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

And while there are some darkly comic moments in writer\/director Richard Shepard\u2019s The Matador<\/strong> \u2013 in which traveling salesman Danny Wright (Greg Kinnear) encounters aging, freelance assassin Julian Noble (Pierce Brosnan) in a Mexico City hotel bar \u2013 the film is more concerned with its characters\u2019 flaws and allowing those flaws to drive the humor in any of the situations the characters may find themselves in.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis movie is called The Matador<\/strong> because matador means \u2018killer,\u2019\u201d explains Shepard to a preview audience in Philadelphia. \u201cThere\u2019s, obviously, the metaphor to bullfighting. Bullfighting, by its very nature is a dying spectacle and Pierce\u2019s character is sort of dying, not physically, but emotionally.\u201d<\/p>\n

In The Matador<\/strong>, Kinear’s traveling businessman befriends Brosnan’s emotionally unstable contract killer while on a trip to Mexico. There friendship is brief, but isn’t ended by Julian’s admission to Danny, “I facilitate fatalities.” Instead, Julian tells Danny he now has the best cocktail party story ever. Several months pass and Julian suddenly finds himself in lethal trouble with his employers and in need of a friend, so he turns to the only person he has been able to call friend in the last three decades of his life- Danny.<\/p>\n

Shepard, who already had the 1991 cult comedy The Linguini Incident<\/strong> and a few direct-to-cable films on his resume, originally intended to shoot The Matador<\/strong> in Mexico independently on a budget of a quarter-of-a-million dollars. However, when he heard that Brosnan\u2019s production company was looking for writers for a sequel to his 200- thriller The Thomas Crown Affair<\/strong>, Shepard sent a copy of the Matador<\/strong> screenplay in as a sample of his writing. While he was hoping to get a meeting with Brosnan and his producing partner to pitch his own ideas for a Thomas Crown<\/strong> sequel, Shepard got a rather different phone call from Brosnan.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe phone rang and it was Pierce on the other end and he said, \u2018I\u2019ve read your script and it was quite disturbing and funny and I would like to star in it,\u2019\u201d states Shepard. With that phone call, what plans Shepard had for a small independent production promptly changed. \u201cSuddenly we were making a much larger film. But to Pierce\u2019s credit, the script that I had written is to script you see in the movie.\u201d<\/p>\n

Unlike a certain other \u201clicensed-to-kill\u201d character that Brosnan has played in the past, The Matador<\/strong> allows Bronson to explore what kind of effect that life can have on someone.<\/p>\n

\u201cI wanted you to know that he was brutal in his killing, but I didn\u2019t really care about the machinations of it,\u201d Shepard explains. \u201cThere are other movies that do those things better. To me, the movie is about his breakdown on the stairs at the racetrack, not going up on the roof to see them do something.<\/p>\n

\u201cI didn\u2019t have the money or time anyway,\u201d he adds with a chuckle, \u201cbut I\u2019ll take it as an artistic decision over an economic one.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>With Brosnan on board, Shepard\u2019s next step was casting actors in the roles of the business man who befriends the assassin on the verge of a nervous breakdown and his wife.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn a movie that doesn\u2019t have car chases, it\u2019s really all about performance,\u201d Shepard states. \u201cWhen we were suddenly making a real movie, I wrote on a piece of paper \u2018Hope Davis\u2019 and \u2018Greg Kinnear.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

And in a rare bit of Hollywood luck, Shepard was able to secure his initial picks for the roles.<\/p>\n

\u201cTo be able to get your first choices really never happens,\u201d enthuses Shepard. \u201cI think Greg is so funny and he\u2019s got a warmth to him and comic sensibility. Hope is like a thief. She comes in and steals every line. But by putting these two great actors opposite Pierce, it sort of said to him \u2018You better come ready to play and not take this lightly because they\u2019ll just whip you off the screen.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAbout three or four weeks before we shot Pierce had a crisis of confidence, and was like \u2018I don\u2019t know if I can do this,\u2019\u201d Shepard recalls. \u201cThat was a very long weekend. But he came to his senses and once he did, he fully went for it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Brosnan\u2019s new found confidence was the source for an improvised sequence that would go on to be prominently featured in the film\u2019s advertising campaign.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe were we shooting at the hotel and the lobby was so great and we weren\u2019t using it. So I said to Pierce, \u2018Do you have any interest in walking through the lobby in your underwear?\u2019 and he said \u2018Well can I wear my boots?\u2019 There were five extras in that scene and all the people in the deep background were people checking into the hotel. We did it in one take.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It sounds like the set up to a Borscht Belt comedian\u2019s routine. \u201cA hitman and a traveling businessman walk into a bar\u2026\u201d And while there are some darkly comic moments in writer\/director Richard Shepard\u2019s The [click for more]<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_ef_editorial_meta_date_first-draft-date":"","_ef_editorial_meta_paragraph_assignment":"","_ef_editorial_meta_checkbox_needs-photo":"","_ef_editorial_meta_number_word-count":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1695],"tags":[432,8133,8132],"series":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-37759","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-features","7":"tag-pierce-brosnan","8":"tag-richard-shepard","9":"tag-the-matador"},"aioseo_notices":[],"nelio_content":{"autoShareEndMode":"never","automationSources":{"useCustomSentences":false,"customSentences":[]},"efiAlt":"","efiUrl":"","followers":[],"highlights":[],"isAutoShareEnabled":false,"networkImageIds":[],"permalinkQueryArgs":[],"series":[],"suggestedReferences":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.filmbuffonline.com\/FBOLNewsreel\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37759","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.filmbuffonline.com\/FBOLNewsreel\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.filmbuffonline.com\/FBOLNewsreel\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.filmbuffonline.com\/FBOLNewsreel\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.filmbuffonline.com\/FBOLNewsreel\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37759"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.filmbuffonline.com\/FBOLNewsreel\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37759\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.filmbuffonline.com\/FBOLNewsreel\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37759"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.filmbuffonline.com\/FBOLNewsreel\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37759"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.filmbuffonline.com\/FBOLNewsreel\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37759"},{"taxonomy":"series","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.filmbuffonline.com\/FBOLNewsreel\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/series?post=37759"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}