NEW MONTE HELLMAN FILM OPENS TOMORROW IN NEW YORK

The director of TWO-LANE BLACKTOP, RIDE IN THE WHIRLWIND, IGUANA and COCKFIGHTER releases his first feature film in 20 years. It opens in New York tomorrow. Hopefully, it will play other venues besides the East Village.

From The New York Times, by John Anderson:

ROAD TO NOWHERE, the latest from the 77-year-old Monty Hellman… is enigmatic, elliptical, defiant of formula and possesses his almost perverse aversion to commerciality. Written by Steven Gaydos…, ROAD may also be as significant to the indie feature as AVATAR is to the popcorn movie: the entire film was shot on what is essentially a still camera (the Canon 5D Mark II), while looking like a mega-million Hollywood production.

Trying to summarize the plot to ROAD TO NOWHERE will get you almost nowhere: a movie within a movie, it involves a North Carolina political scandal, a double suicide, multiple identities and myriad flashbacks, U-turns and pirouettes in the plotline.

But the script is exactly what Mr. Hellman says he wanted.

“It’s the kind of film I’ve always been attracted to,” he said. What drew him to his masterpiece, TWO-LANE BLACKTOP and to a lesser extent the Warren Oates vehicle COCKFIGHTER (1974), was “that they were about a life of gambling,” he said. “My father was a professional gambler, so I kind of have an affinity for that.”

And yet his deeper interest lay elsewhere. “While I love making things as realistic as possible, I’m interested in stories that are a little more surreal,” he said. “I’ve always been drawn to, say, what Alain Resnais did in LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD where there’s a kind of puzzle going on. I love to play with the idea of complex reality and mixing memory with present time and the whole idea of reality versus fantasy. So this is a dream project for me.”

Read the entire article here: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/16/movies/16hellman.html