Word: pacino
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...film, Insomnia, is more conventional than Memento (it starts at the beginning, for one thing) but just as unsettling. It stars Al Pacino as a morally dubious Los Angeles cop who is exiled to Alaska to solve a murder and Robin Williams as the killer. "To me, the whole film is like a nightmare," says Nolan, 31, smiling as he gently rocks to and fro, "some awful waking dream...
Nolan, who says he wants to shake up the linear traditions of film, wakes up a tired genre with Insomnia. When Pacino shoots his partner, the director's subtle touches leave the audience wondering whether the cop did it on purpose. The same scene appears slightly different each time it is viewed in flashback. "I tend to have quite a fractured mise-en-scene, to use a phrase I don't really understand," says Nolan, who was born in England, studied at University College London and developed his taste for the shady side from American film noir...
Nolan had three leads with wildly different styles of working. Pacino required rigorous rehearsals, long conversations about character, and numerous takes; Williams wanted many takes but minimal rehearsal; and Swank preferred to do simply a few takes and save her energy. Nolan's solution was to let Pacino and Williams experiment as much as they wanted while they worked alone. "The best actors," says Nolan, "instinctively feel out what the other actors need, and they just accommodate...
...real puzzle is, Did Will Dormer (Al Pacino) also commit murder? That is to say, Did he, with malice aforethought, shoot his partner Hap (Martin Donovan), or was it an accident--a snap shot in the fog as they were stalking Finch near the scene of his crime...
What we have here is your basic good-cop-bad-cop story, except that those two characters are wrapped into one, with Pacino giving one of his terrific tormented performances in the role--impatient, arrogant and, in the long watches of the night, almost pathetically vulnerable. Williams is also good--an entrancing smoothy you can well imagine Will succumbing to. Hilary Swank represents rationality--a smart, inexperienced cop who deeply admires Will and can't quite believe the case she begins to develop against...