Word: ghosts
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Hare International Airport. Rows of houses, a few still ribboned with Christmas lights, lie empty, their doors boarded up. Low-flying jets pierce the silence. Police still patrol for vandals, and contractors tend to unkempt lawns, but in the fading afternoon light, parts of this eerie village resemble a ghost town...
Even so, being in charge retains its appeal. Gervais did Ghost Town in part to help prepare for shooting This Side of the Truth, an $18 million film due out next year, co-starring Jennifer Garner, about a world in which he's the first person to lie. He financed it without a studio so he'd have control. And he's working on a movie with his writing partner on The Office and Extras, Stephen Merchant, called The Man from the Pru, about a group of twentysomething friends in 1970s England trying to escape from their poor, small town...
That self-assurance is why he's been turning down movie roles ever since the second episode of The Office. He had no interest in starring in a film he didn't have complete creative control over. His new movie, Ghost Town--a small, hilarious romantic comedy about a dyspeptic dentist besieged by the dead to help them complete their unfinished business--opens Sept. 19 and marks the first time Gervais has taken a major role in a movie he didn't write and direct. "I was being a baby. I didn't like being away from home...
...ness of it cracks him up. "Paintings! That's great. They have to be very specific. Like 'Things Made of Clay.' It's a bit like This Side of the Truth, where there's a sign that says CHEAP MOTEL FOR SEX WITH A NEAR STRANGER." On the Ghost Town set, he'd do 15 takes of a scene, trying out different runs; here he flits among the artworks, making great jokes, most of which I have to promise not to print since they're about religious paintings and he's an atheist who likes to offend without hurting...
First, there's not a lot in the preceding pages to support Theroux's proclamation that the world is going to hell in a hand-basket. And second, anyone who thinks that about most of the places covered in Ghost Train is clearly not paying attention. The Cambodians, the Vietnamese, the Russians, the Indians - their world is "worsening?" Compared to 30 years ago? If Theroux actually believes that, it tells us more about the author, 30 years on, than the places he has visited...