Word: saintes
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...months before shooting was to begin on Paramount's The Saint, the Aussie auteur Phillip Noyce went to visit the movie's star, who was on location in Australia for another film. When the actor didn't show up for their meeting, Noyce sighed and thought, "Well, this is Val Kilmer." That would be Val Kilmer the Hollywood bad boy, whose very name spurs some directors to spit venom. Noyce walked outside and into a dark street, then became aware of someone following him. "I stopped in a doorway and looked over my shoulder, but no one was there. Suddenly...
That would be Val Kilmer the meticulous student of each role he plays, from randy Jim Morrison in The Doors to the courtly, consumptive Doc Holliday in Tombstone. On that night in Australia, says Noyce, "he was already acting the role of the Saint." Later Noyce and scriptwriter Wesley Strick trekked to South Africa, where Kilmer was shooting another film. "Let's go," the actor greeted them. He hopped into a Land Rover and, steering wheel in one hand, cigarette in the other, drove them madly across dirt roads to a distant campsite where he was living in a tent...
...potential franchise role in Paramount's revival of The Saint. This isn't the clarety Simon Templar that George Sanders played in three Saint films in the '40s or the capering Roger Moore of the '60s TV show. Kilmer's Simon is a man unsure of his own identity and compelled to wear disguises as if he were shopping for a new soul. Similarly, Noyce eschews the campy look of Bond or Batman. The movie, about a post-Soviet plutocrat (Rade Serbedzija) who tries to mastermind a new Russian revolution, is dark--almost drab--and broody. It seems deeply riven...
...situation of most exiles in America in the late 1930s and '40s. Two dachshunds meet on the palisade in Santa Monica, California, and schmooze about their fortunes. "Here, it's true, I'm a dachshund," says one to the other. "But in the old country I was a Saint Bernard...
...name, in the beginning, was not Deng Xiaoping. The eldest son of the county sheriff was given a two-character name that meant "first saint," perhaps a reference to his father's Buddhist piety. Only later, in France, did Deng Xiansheng become Deng Xiaoping, the two new syllables a prescient nom de guerre, literally meaning "little peace," an augury of both tumult and relief. In 1920, at the age of 16, Deng left his rural home deep inland in Sichuan for the port of Shanghai. There he learned basic French and won a scholarship for a work-study program...