My wife is Palestinian and, both here and in the States, she is regarded with suspicion but also attraction. In The Usual Suspects the killer has emerged from the chaos of the Balkans, a theme that the writer apparently borrowed from a 1940's adaptation of an Eric Ambler novel, A Coffin for Dimitrios. In more recent films, Jean Reno has played a French killer in America (L?), Tim Roth a Russian-Jewish hit-man in Brooklyn (Little Odessa), and Forest Whitaker has played a black killer in a white Italian world (Ghost Dog). Again and again, this loneliness is heightened by making the hit man a foreigner.
The hit man is always a loner: like Alain Delon in Le Samourai, where he is explicitly compared to the wandering swordsmen of Kurosawa's films. In our live screenplay, the part will be played by Daniela Nardini, the kind of dream casting that makes a writer's mouth water.The French, or European, motif comes through the hit man himself. He has met a female doctor and begun to wonder if love can set him free. But as he watches this second woman, his target, he begins to fall for her.
Another genre convention: the good woman and the femme fatale. As the story develops, the distance between these two archetypes becomes more fluid, more lost in the shadows. As I was writing the screenplay, I knew that the same actress would have to play both women, which again recalls Hitchcock, this time Vertigo and the part played by Kim Novak. It is something of a shock when a more naturalistic Chandler appears on screen, like Robert Altman's version of The Long Goodbye with its beaches and sunlight. As soon as any oxygen is allowed into the claustrophobic world of the crime thriller, it loses its power to shock and to seduce.I came up with a story. A lonely hit man is asked to watch a woman and, on a given signal, kill her.
