“Reality is grossly overrated.”
-- Andrew Niccol

In a celebrity culture, no assertion is more easily forgiven.

Just ask Viktor Taransky, writer/director/producer Andrew Niccol’s onscreen counterpart: “It’s easier to make 100,000 people believe than just one.” And that is what Taransky and Niccol do with S1mOne, the embodiment of today’s ultimate hyphenate star: actress-director-singer-poet-philanthropist, not to mention having her own branded perfume: S1mOne The Cologne. She is the sizzle that keeps on selling to a public refusing to disbelieve.

Niccol’s wry send-up of Hollywood skewers movie star idolatry, a self-perpetuating myth not to be denied by players in front of or behind the camera or, for that matter, an adoring public.

“What does it matter if celebrities are real?” asks native New Zealander Niccol, the Academy Awardâ-nominated screenwriter of The Truman Show and writer/director of Gattaca. “Our celebrity-obsessed culture can’t tell the difference anyway. Our ability to manufacture fraud exceeds our ability to detect it.”

Examining that inability gave life to the story of Viktor Taransky, a man Niccol describes as a disillusioned director desperate to finish his film when the “Holy Grail of software” falls into his lap. It enables him to create “the first totally believable synthetic actor, indistinguishable from flesh and blood. Of course,” he adds, “with any such creation it has the potential to destroy you.”

It was the consequences of that creation more than the creation of S1mOne that proved titillating. “What if you have an artificial human and neglect to mention that she’s artificial? How can you keep up the deceit? And what if you are so successful in the hoax that when you finally tell the truth, you are not believed?” Niccol muses. “The lie is more believable to the world than the truth.”

For Niccol, selling that lie convincingly had to come from a performance only Al Pacino could deliver: “Al brings something subversive to the role of a man who is the advocate of artificial humans,” he adds. “When such a respected actor says, `Who needs actors?’ you take notice. If a more comedic actor made that statement, it wouldn’t have the same gravity.”

A modest Pacino was both “flattered and humbled” by Niccol’s reason for choosing him to portray Taransky, who he calls an “interesting, funny and strange little fellow.” But he placed credit for Taransky at the feet of Niccol, who he described as a “gifted visionary.”
Pacino was attracted to the role because of Taransky’s “eccentricity, his approach to dealing with life and his work and mainly because he looked like someone who had to fight for everything he got.”

While Taransky finds success with his creation, Pacino notes that when all is said and done, “Viktor doesn’t want to be alone. He wants to feel the comfort and support and encouragement of family and love with other humans.” To Pacino, the “big unanswered question in the movie is how his secret is perpetuated and that’s what’s interesting. It allows for a certain ambivalence, which is always fun for an audience to think about.”

Although Taransky is a man whose identity was once indelibly linked to his integrity, success prompts him to bend the rules in meeting his fluctuating personal truths. As Niccol says: “In trying to convince the world that S1mOne exists, Viktor is actually trying to convince the world that he exists.” Pacino adds that Taransky “needs to be recognized for having devoted his life in the pursuit of something that he feels is valuable.” But where he ultimately succeeds, “is through his natural intuitive gifts as an actor himself,” mimicked through S1mOne. This prompts the public to “relate to her and feel humanized by the relationship, to feel as though they are represented in this so- called idealized world of show business and glory and fame,” he continues.

As for the character of S1mOne, Pacino says he found her “fascinating. She is rich with ideals and is consumed by her work and her need to excel at what she does. Therefore she devotes all of her time to her pursuit, to making herself appealing to people and allowing them to relate to her hoping that she serves the story and the play and I think that is a real unusual approach. She is ego-less and yet at the same time she employs all the aspects of performance and keeps it simple.”

Although Pacino hasn’t appeared in a comedy for some time, it was the script’s “take on the world” that lured him. “Its relationship to success was at once interesting and ironic. It was also amusing and had a light touch and in having that light touch it expressed a deeper, more profound idea.”

A chance to work with Pacino and Niccol in a film about Hollywood laughing at itself is what attracted Catherine Keener to the role of Elaine. “She’s not the brightest bulb despite the fact that she is running a studio,” notes Keener. “She’s well-dressed, shallow, your basic sycophant… but in a good way. I think her shining moments are with her daughter Lainey (played by Evan Rachel Wood). Elaine is immature but it is her daughter who has it together.” She describes Elaine’s relationship with Viktor as tormented but with a longstanding respect and underlying love. Her relationship with S1mOne is one of frustration. “Here she is, this studio head, and she can’t control this unknown actress because of the power of celebrity.” It’s access to that power that proves the slippery slope for everyone but Taransky.

Evan Rachel Wood, a 14-year-old who has been in show business for nine years, says of Elaine, her studio chief mom: “She really summarizes the business pretty well. Lainey, my character, is really kind of the parent. She keeps everybody grounded. Throughout the whole movie she really wants her parents to get back together. She loves her dad because he’s honest and true to what he believes. Then he does this movie to try to get everything back and he has to keep lying. It was just better not to mess with it in the first place, but then it wouldn’t have turned out the way it did. There’s just no easy answer.” But there is a deeper, personal message Wood hopes audiences will carry with them -- “Stay true to yourself, follow your dreams and don’t give up.”

For Jay Mohr, playing the vacuous leading man Hal was a chance to clinch one of his acting dreams. “Hal’s an actor who is dimly lit and self-absorbed; but hey, I would have taken any role to be in a film with Al Pacino,” he says. “I loved the script and I would say that no greater satire has been made about Hollywood. Andrew couldn’t have picked a better actor than Pacino to portray Viktor, a guy who desperately wants to get back in the game and be taken seriously as a player again.”

A refusal to give up in his pursuit to unravel the truth about Taransky and his leading lady S1mOne is the driving force behind Max Sayer. In shaping Max, Pruitt Taylor Vince “tried to combine that National Enquirer sense of journalism but with a guy who really wanted to be Woodward and Bernstein in All the President’s Men, just a dog with a bone who grabbed on and wasn’t letting go.” In short, Max exemplifies “this blurring of lines” between legitimate reporting and muckraking “as celebrity journalism has sort of taken over the tone of real reporting,” says Vince. “There’s all this self-involvement and projection in telling a story now that’s not news but this hybrid between sensation and something else. The truth has become this concept – an option. In another time I think Max would have been a good journalist, but in this world he is what his world makes him – the essence of celebrity journalism and what it creates.”

An essence of a certain Hollywood is what Niccol and his crew created in S1mOne. ”It is a contemporary story shot in a classic style reminiscent of the Golden Age of Hollywood,” says Director of Photography Edward Lachman. “Although we shot it in a way that harkens back to an earlier time, we tried to give it that sense of timelessness, a quality that’s the best of European film but brought back to Hollywood… that on-the-edge-of-mainstream approach.“

Filmed in and around Los Angeles, the primary locations were Warner Bros.’ Burbank lot and soundstages at the Sunset Gower Studios and Paramount Pictures’ renovated front gate -- all serving as the fictitious Amalgamated Film Studios. “We put up facades at the entrance of Paramount around the old gates and even Paramount was surprised at how it transformed the look,” says production designer Jan Roelfs. “A lot of the exteriors were shot on the Warner lot. Throughout we really tried to create the essence of that `30s Hollywood bungalow feel. It was all about pulling from the beautiful things of the past, but making it real in the future.”

THE MAKING OF A STAR

“She starts her life hollow and she finishes in dust…”

Pretty simple instructions for being the point person in shaping the world’s biggest star, says Valerie Delahaye, designer for the Los Angeles-based office of the French effects house BUF, Inc., which created S1mOne.

“She’s pretty much 3D computer generated. It was important to Andrew to show the inside of her body and head as hollow so that you look inside and see the reverse of her, just this bended image. He wanted the simplicity of her to follow the story, the concept of an actor as just this head to fill.”

Crystal Dowd, the film’s visual effects producer, says the scenes in which S1mOne’s bended image is given birth “are actually shot with two motion control rigs that were aligned perfectly to create the unusual effect you see.”

In creating Taransky’s ideal digital star, trademark qualities of Hollywood’s “Legend Library” of leading ladies were incorporated into S1mOne. Her look is “a mix of Audrey Hepburn, Grace Kelly and others. She had to be contemporary but not so trendy that she would be quickly dated,” says Niccol. In an effort to keep the mystery alive, Niccol quips: “Other voices and body parts (from the Library) were used to enhance S1mOne. But most of these prefer to go uncredited.”

While Niccol and the effects artists declined specifics, all say S1mOne ’s look was also shaped from different elements of an unidentified actress. “All synthespians are part pixels and part flesh and blood,” Niccol says. “We’re just not going to say which part is which.”

In a sense, the hybrid image is nothing new.

“You have to realize digital work is done to real actors now,” Niccol continues. “I’ve done it to actors in my films” – such as erasing unsightly blemishes, making limbs smaller or an actor’s girth narrower, even face replacement if needed. Many stunt doubles are fakes now. Plus, you have scenes that are being digitally altered. Say you have a shot of two actors and maybe the performance of just one is great in one scene. You just take a different performance (of the same scene) with the other actor and splice them together. There’s a lot more digital tricks being used today than audiences realize.”

Blackbox Digital, which did the predominant share of effects shots in the film, also created the “Simonizing” effect in which Taransky enhances his star with the voice, body, smile and carriage of legendary actresses. “The concept is kind of endearing but also speaks to the whole superficiality of how we characterize actresses today like someone saying, `Oh she has that Lauren Bacall voice’,” says Kent Demaine, co-owner of Blackbox. “It’s about familiarity that we claim as new. Our job was primarily to make this look perfect and very smooth.”

A third effects house, Grey Matter in Venice, utilized 3D animation to create the hologram effect in S1mOne ‘s concert performance, Dowd notes.

But making S1mOne ’s performance believable meant a believable performance from her co-stars as well. When actors weren’t working with a green screen, a stand-in would fill in for S1mOne, says Niccol. In the film, S1mOne never sees the actors and they never see her.

“We all know synthespians are coming,” Niccol notes. “Very soon we will reach a point when we switch on a television or a computer, see an actor or newscaster, and not know if they are flesh and blood and what’s more…not care.”

ABOUT THE CAST

Al Pacino (Viktor Taransky)
Al Pacino is an eight-time Academy Awardâ nominee. After having received four Best Actor nominations for ...And Justice For All, The Godfather Part II, Dog Day Afternoon and Serpico, for which he also earned a Golden Globe Award, Pacino's portrayal as Lt. Colonel Frank Slade in Scent Of A Woman won him a Best Actor Academy Awardâ and Best Actor Golden Globe Award. He recently starred in Christopher Nolan’s suspense thriller Insomnia opposite Robin Williams and Hilary Swank as a detective who travels to a small Alaskan town to investigate a brutal murder.

Pacino is thrice nominated by the Academy as Best Supporting Actor for his roles as Michael Corleone in The Godfather, Big Boy Caprice in Dick Tracy (he won a 1990 American Comedy Award for this role), and as Ricky Roma in David Mamet’s screen adaptation of Glengarry Glen Ross.

Pacino recently starred in Oliver Stone’s Any Given Sunday, opposite Cameron Diaz; The Insider, Michael Mann’s project about the tobacco industry, opposite Russell Crowe; and in Chinese Coffee, a film that Pacino directed, starred in and produced. Pacino also starred as Richard III in Looking for Richard, a meditation on Shakespeare’s Richard III, which he conceived and directed and for which he received the Outstanding Directorial Achievement for a Documentary award from the Directors Guild of America. Pacino also recently appeared in Mike Newell’s Donnie Brasco, co-starring Johnny Depp and Devil’s Advocate with Keanu Reeves and Charlize Theron.

Other film credits include Two Bits with Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio; Heat for Warner Bros. Pictures, starring with Robert De Niro and Val Kilmer; co-starring with John Cusack and Bridget Fonda in City Hall and Brian De Palma’s Carlito’s Way. Additional credits include Frankie & Johnny, The Godfather, Part III, Sea of Love, Revolution, Scarface (written by Oliver Stone), Author! Author!, Bobby Deerfield and Scarecrow, for which he received the Best Actor Award at the Cannes Film Festival in 1973. Pacino also produced, starred in and co-directed the independent film adaptation of the play The Local Stigmatic, presented in March 1990 at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and the Public Theatre. Pacino made his film debut in 1971 in The Panic in Needle Park.

Pacino attended the famed High School of the Performing Arts while working part-time as a theater usher. After studying with Herbert Berghof and later with Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio, Pacino made his professional acting debut in Off-Broadway productions of The Connection and Hello, Out There. He then won an Obie Award for Israel Horovitz’s The Indian Wants the Bronx.

Pacino has two Tony Awards for his starring roles in The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel and Does A Tiger Wear A Necktie? He is a longtime member of David Wheeler’s Experimental Theatre Company of Boston, where he has performed in Richard III and in Bertolt Brecht’s Arturo Ui. In New York and London he acted in David Mamet’s American Buffalo. Also in New York he appeared in Richard III and as Marc Antony in Julius Caesar at the late Joseph Papp’s Public Theatre.

During the spring and summer of 1994, Pacino appeared in repertory at Circle in the Square. He presented the New York debut of Oscar Wilde’s Salome and the premiere presentation of Ira Lewis’ Chinese Coffee. He directed and starred in Eugene O’Neill’s Hughie, which opened in early July 1996 at the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, and moved to Circle in the Square in New York, where it continued its run through the end of August.

Pacino won the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Independent Feature Project (IFP) at their 1996 Gotham Awards. Upcoming projects for Pacino are The Farm and People I Know for Miramax films.

Catherine Keener (Elaine)
Aside from her role as studio chief, mother and ex-wife of neurotic disillusioned director Viktor Taransky in S1mOne, Catherine recently appeared as a vice president of development in Danny DeVito's Death to Smoochy, with Robin Williams and Edward Norton.

Keener can also be seen this summer in Nicole Holofcener's Lovely & Amazing, co-starring Dermot Mulroney, Brenda Blethyn, Emily Mortimer and Jake Gyllenhaal and Steven Soderbergh's Full Frontal, co-starring Julia Roberts, Blair Underwood, David Hyde Pierce and Mary McCormack.

Keener received an Academy Award® nomination for Best Supporting Actress for her performance as Maxine, the manipulative co-worker who seduces the puppeteer, his wife and the title character in Spike Jonze's Being John Malkovich. Later this year, she makes a cameo appearance in Jonze's Adaptation.

Keener's film credits also include Neil LaBute's Your Friends and Neighbors, Soderbergh's Out of Sight, Holofcener's Walking and Talking and the screen adaptation of Sam Shepard's Simpatico. She appeared in four films by Tom DiCillo: Box of Moonlight, Johnny Suede, Living in Oblivion and The Real Blonde.

On television, Keener appeared in HBO's critically acclaimed anthology, "If These Walls Could Talk," directed by Nancy Savoca, and made a notable guest appearance on "Seinfeld."

This fall, she co-stars with Edward Norton in the Signature Theater Company's off-Broadway revival of Lanford Wilson's "Burn This."

Evan Rachel Wood (Lainey)
Evan Rachel Wood is one of Hollywood’s rising young stars in both film and television. She is best known for her starring role in ABC’s critically acclaimed hit drama series “Once and Again” in which she played Billy Campbell’s sensitive daughter Jessie who struggles with the pain of her parents divorce. In S1mOne, she plays Lainey, the wise, mature and steady daughter of divorced parents Viktor Taransky and Elaine Christian.

The 14-year-old native of Raleigh, North Carolina has been working steadily as an actress for nine years.

Her feature film debut was Timothy Hutton’s Digging to China as Harriet Frankovitz. But her breakout in film was the role of Kylie Owens in Practical Magic opposite Nicole Kidman and Sandra Bullock. She was last seen in Detour with Michael Madsen and will appear in Blair Treu’s Little Secrets in the lead role of Emily, opposite Vivica A. Fox and Michael Angarano.

Her theater credits include: “The Miracle Worker” for Theatre in the Park, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” for Shakespeare in the Park and a three-year tour with “A Christmas Carol.” The black belt in Tae Kwon Do is also trained in singing and dancing.

Wood, who is a black belt in Tae Kwan Do, is also trained in singing and dancing.

Jay Mohr (Hal)
Jay Mohr is the quintessential Hollywood hyphenate, known for his performances in film, television, radio and as a stand-up comic.

The Verona, New Jersey native, who dreamed of being a comedian as a teenager, became a regular on the long running hit series “Saturday Night Live,” best known for his impressions of Christopher Walken, Sean Penn, Rikki Lake and Dick Vitale. It has made him a fixture in television. His “Mohr Sports,” a weekly comedy/music/sports talk hour show, which began airing on ESPN in April, followed Mohr’s year as host of Fox’ “NFL This Morning” and narrator of “Beyond The Glory.”

His television and feature credits have grown simultaneously. Although his feature debut was For Better or For Worse, it was his next role as Bob Sugar, rival agent to Tom Cruise in the blockbuster Jerry Maguire that really grabbed Hollywood’s attention. He can next be seen opposite Eddie Murphy in The Adventures of Pluto Nash and Speaking of Sex, co-starring Bill Murray.

Mohr has also appeared in the romantic comedy Picture Perfect with Jennifer Aniston, Pay It Forward opposite Kevin Spacey and Helen Hunt and in Doug Liman’s critically acclaimed Go. His film credits also include: Cherry Falls, 200 Cigarettes, Playing By Heart, Suicide Kings, Small Soldiers and Paulie (as the voice of Benny).

In television, he starred as Peter Dragon in the critically acclaimed Fox series “Action.” Aside from numerous Saturday Night Live appearances, some of which he also wrote, his other television credits include: ABC’s “Camp Wilder,” and “The Jeff Foxworthy Show;” HBO’s “From the Earth to the Moon,” Disney’s “The Barefoot Executive” and Fox’s “Black River” and “Night Visions.”

He often guest hosts the nation’s number one syndicated sports radio program, Premiere Radio’s “Jim Rome Show.” He is also a regular guest on New York’s nationally syndicated “Opie & Anthony Show” and L.A.’s number one morning show, KROQ’s “Kevin & Bean.”

Pruitt Taylor Vince (Max Sayer)
Pruitt Taylor Vince has received an Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actor for his recurring role as a serial killer on ABC’s “Murder One: Diary of a Serial Killer.”

But it was the Baton Rouge, LA. native’s performance as the lovelorn cook in the critically acclaimed Heavy, which won the Sundance Film Festival’s Special Jury Prize, that really captured Hollywood’s attention. His feature debut was Walter Hill’s Red Heat.

He can be seen in 13 Moons opposite Steve Buscemi, Trapped with Charlize Theron and Kevin Bacon and I.D. co-starring John Cusack, Ray Liotta and Amanda Peet.
He has appeared in Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers and JFK. His other film credits include: The Cell, Nurse Betty, Mumford, Love From Ground Zero, Cold Around the Heart, The End of Violence, The Cottonwood, Beautiful Girls, Under the Hula Moon, Nobody’s Fool, City Slickers II: The Legend of Curly’s Gold, China Moon, Jacob’s Ladder, Come See the Paradise, Wild at Heart, Homer & Eddie, K-9, Mississippi Burning, Shy People, Barfly and Angel Heart.

His television credits include: Fox’s “The X-Files” and “L.A. Confidential,” ABC’s “Gideon’s Crossing,” “The Marshall” and “I Know My Name is Steven,” CBS’s “Chicago Hope” and “Night Sins,” NBC’s “Sisters” and “Till Death Do Us Part“ and USA Network’s “Dead in the Water” and “Sweet Poison.”

Elias Koteas (Hank Aleno)
Elias Koteas, who reteamed with S1mOne Writer/Director/Producer Andrew Niccol after Gattaca, was nominated twice for a Genie (Canada’s Academy Award) for best actor in Roger Cardinal’s Malarek and Atom Egoyan’s Exotica.

But it was the Montreal native’s breakthrough performance as Vaughan, the mad scientist with a sexual fetish for car crashes in David Cronenberg’s controversial Crash that catapulted his career. Although he was an established and popular actor in Canada, his breakthrough performance in the U.S. was his role as vigilante Casey Jones in New Line Cinema’s blockbuster franchise Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

He was most recently seen in the films Collateral Damage, Harrison’s Flowers and Novocaine and will soon appear in the upcoming Ararat.

His film credits include: Lost Souls, Dancing at the Blue Iguana, Divorce: A Contemporary Western, The Thin Red Line, Living Out Loud, Apt Pupil, Fallen, Hit Me, Camilla, Power of Attorney, Chain of Desire, The Adjuster, Almost an Angel, Look Who’s Talking Too, Desperate Hours, Blood Red, Full Moon in Blue Water, Tucker: The Man and His Dream, Some Kind of Wonderful, Gardens of Stone, One Magic Christmas and Friends, Lovers & Lunatics.

His television credits include: HBO’s “Sopranos,” telefilms “Shot in the Heart” and “Sugartime” and TNT’s “The Habitation of Dragons.”

His theatre credits include: “True West” on Broadway, “Rainbow” at the Actor’s Studio, “Terry Neal’s Future” at EST Marathon, “Kiss of the Spider Woman” at Yale Repertory Theatre and “Death of A Salesman” at The Studio Theatre.

A graduate of the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, he is also a member of the Actor’s Studio.

Jason Schwartzman (Milton)
Jason Schwartzman charmed audiences with his debut performance as the eccentric high school sophomore Max Fischer in Wes Anderson’s acclaimed comedy Rushmore. Since then the drummer for Los Angeles band Phantom Planet has appeared in five feature films when the band is not on tour. The band will release their second album, “The Guest” on the Epic label in February.

He recently appeared in the ensemble comedy Slackers and in Roman Coppola’s C.Q. and can be seen in Spun opposite Mena Suvari and John Leguizamo, Just Like Mona co-starring Andy Garcia, Marcia Gay Harden and Diane Lane.

Stanley Anderson (Frank Brand)
Stanley Anderson has for the last twelve years acted in film and television after twenty-five years of theatre work. Currently, he can be seen in Sam Raimi’s hit comic book adaptation of Spiderman as well as 40 Days and 40 Nights, and appears in the upcoming Red Dragon. His film credits include: Proof of Life, Disney’s The Kid, Arlington Road, Waking the Dead, Armageddon, The Rock, Primal Fear, The Pelican Brief, Canadian Bacon, City Hall a film which also starred Simone’s Al Pacino, Shadow Conspiracy, Robocop III, Deceived and He Said, She Said.

Telefilms and Miniseries credits include: CBS’s “Yesterday’s Children,” “The Secret” and “Reunion, Lifetime’s “An American Daughter,“ ABC’s “The Shining,” “Son of the Morningstar,” and “Dead Before Dawn,” NBC’s “The Lake” and “Murder Between Friends.” He was a series regular on ABC’s “Dangerous Minds” and recurs as Drew’s dad on “The Drew Carey Show.” He also recurred on CBS’s “Michael Hayes” and “Players.” A member of The Acting Company of Arena Stage, he appeared in more than 70 productions from 1972 to 1990. He also acted with the companies of Actors Theatre of Louisville, The Seattle Repertory Theatre, ACT, The Festival Theatre, The Actor’s company, and The California Shakespeare Company.

ABOUT THE FILMMAKERS

Andrew Niccol (Director, Writer, Producer)
Andrew Niccol was nominated for an Academy Awardâ for Best Screenplay and won Britain’s BAFTA Award for Oscar contender The Truman Show starring Jim Carrey, which he wrote and produced.

The native New Zealander began his career directing commercials in London but moved to Los Angeles because he wanted to make films “longer than 60 seconds.” He wrote The Truman Show before writing and directing the critically acclaimed Gattaca. That original screenplay was his feature film directing debut and starred Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman. It was nominated for an Academy Awardâ for Art Direction and a Golden Globe for Music. The film was an international best bringing Niccol Spain’s Catalonian International Film Festival Best Film Award, a Gerardmer Film Festival Special Jury Prize, a London Film Critics ALFS Award and a best screenplay nomination from the Writers Guild of America. It was also nominated for the Paris Film Festival’s Grand Prix Award.

Bradley Cramp (Executive Producer)
Bradley Cramp has collaborated with S1mOne Writer/ Director/ Producer Andrew Niccol on all of his films. He was the production supervisor on Gattaca, which Niccol wrote and directed. He served as assistant to Niccol on the Academy Awardâ-nominated The Truman Show.

Edward Lachman (Director of Photography)
Edward Lachman has photographed an impressive and extensive collection of films, including Steven Soderbergh’s Academy Award® nominated Erin Brokovich. His cinematographic credits include Mi Familia and Dark Horizon.

He also photographed Steven Soderbergh’s The Limey, Sofia Coppola's acclaimed Virgin Suicides, Gregory Nava's Selena, Why do Fools Fall in Love, Paul Schrader's Touch, Light Sleeper, Stacy Cochran's My New Gun, Hanisf Kureshi London Kills Me, Mira Nair's Mississippi Masala, Dennis Hopper's Backtrack, Marek Kanievska's Less Than Zero, Susan Seidelman's Making Mr. Right and Desperately Seeking Susan, Maroun Bagdadi Little Wars, Mark Reichert's Union City and Steve Verona's Lords of Flatbush.

One of the few American cinematographers to be acclaimed both in Europe and America. In the 70's and early 80's Ed worked with the German New Wave director Werner Herzog's on Stroszek, La Souffriere and Wim Wender's Lightening Over Water, Tokyo Ga and also worked with European Directors Volker Schlondorff's Gathering of Old Men and Reiner Werner Fassbinder's BlueTrain. He also worked with Bernardo Bertolucci and Jean Luc Godard. He Just completed Todd Haynes new film Far From Heaven and Homage to Douglas Cirk with Julienne Moore and Dennis Quaid. He recently Directed Harmony Korine's script Ken Park, and other directing credits include Songs for Drella, an homage to Andy Warhol with the music of Lou Reed and John Cale, Report From Hollywood and Get Your Kicks on Route 66. He has been nominated for Independant Spirit Award for Best Cinematography for True Stories, Light Sleeper and Virgin Suicides.

Jan Roelfs (Production Designer)
Jan Roelfs has been nominated for two Academy Awardsâ for his exquisite art direction of Director/Writer Andrew Niccol’s Gattaca and Orlando. For Gattaca, the Amsterdam native was also nominated for a Society of Motion Picture and Television Art Directors Award for Excellence in Production Design and a Golden Satellite Award for Outstanding Art Direction. He also won the Nederlands Film Festival Golden Calf Award for art direction for the film. He designed New Line Cinema’s The Astronaut’s Wife and the recently released Bad Company. His credits include Flawless, The Juror, The Grotesque, Little Women, 1000 Rosen, The Baby of Macon, Eline Vere, Prospero’s Books, The Cook the Thief His Wife & Her Lover, Drowning by Numbers, A Zed & Two Noughts and the telefilm “M Is for Man, Music, Mozart.”

Elisabetta Beraldo (Costume Designer)
A native of Genoa, Italy, has created the wardrobes for Gregory Hoblit’s Hart’s War and Frequency and two Gregory Nava films, Why Do Fools Fall in Love? and Selena. She also designed Fluke and was co-designer on Camilla. She won a David di Donatello Award (Italy’s Academy Award) and a Ciack d’oro Award for Roberto Faenza’s Jonah In the Whale and received a nomination for Faenza’s Sostiene Pereira, the last movie of the late Marcello Mastroianni. She was also nominated for a Genie Award for Anna Benson Gyles’ Swann. She was assistant costume designer on Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather III, Warren Beatty’s Dick Tracy and Michael Cimino’s The Sicilian. She also designed wardrobe for Ken Russell’s opera “La Boehme.”

Paul Rubell (Editor)
Paul Rubell has received a shared Oscar nomination for his work on Michael Mann’s The Insider, for which he also received nominations from the American Cinema Editors Eddie Awards and the Golden Satellite Awards. He won an Eddie Award and an Emmy nomination for John Frankenheimer’s HBO Film “Andersonville”, and received Eddie nominations for the telefilms “The Burning Season” and “My Name is Bill W.” Rubell’s feature film credits have included XXX, New Line Cinema’s The Cell and Blade.

Carter Burwell (Composer)
A veteran of the downtown New York art music scene Carter Burwell’s first foray into film scoring was for the Coen Brothers’ 1984 feature Blood Simple. Carter quickly became on of the most significant composers on the indie-alt scene, scoring films such as the Brad Pitt/Juliette Lewis/David Duchovny starrer Kalifornia, and Stephen Gyllenhaal’s Waterland in addition to the Coen Brothers’ Raising Arizona, Miller’s Crossing, Barton Fink and Hudsucker Proxy. Though it didn’t take long for the studios to discover him (Carter was soon scoring major features such as the Michael Caton-Jones’ Rob Roy, Imagine/Universal’s The Chamber, Richard Donner’s Conspiracy Theory, Fox’s Jennifer Aniston-starrer Picture Perfect and Michael Caton-Jones’ The Jackal). Carter has continued to maintain an impressive alliance with the indie scene scoring films like Fargo, The Big Lebowski, David Mamet’s The Spanish Prisoner, Todd Hayne’s Velvet Goldmine and Bill Condon’s Gods & Monsters starring Brendan Fraser and Ian McKellan.

Other credits include Disney’s Mystery Alaska (starring Russell Crowe and Burt Reynolds), The Corruptor starring Mark Wahlberg and Chow Yun Fat for New Line, The General’s Daughter (John Travolta) for Paramount, director Spike Jonze’s Being John Malkovich (John Cusack and Cameron Diaz) for PolyGram Filmed Entertainment, the Warner Bros. feature Three Kings starring George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg, Burwell also provided the score for the Cohen Brothers film, O Brother, Where Art Thou, starring George Clooney and John Goodman and most recently Disney’s The Rookie with Dennis Quaid, as well as the upcoming Spike Jonze film Adaptation with Nicolas Cage and Meryl Streep.

His musical works in the theatre include Mabou Mines “Mother” (LAMama ETC), Henry Millers “The 14th Ward” (LAMama ETC), the chamber opera “The Celestial Alphabet Event” (Under the Roff, 1991), and Ariel Dorman’s play “Widows” (Williamstown Theatre Festival). He is currently working on “Cara Lucia”, a work in progress with Mabou Mines that will premiere in 2002 and “Lots Wife and Other Tales of Turning Back”, a dance piece with Sara Pearson and Patrik Widrig Dance Company which will premiere in 2003.

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