Who's gonna pay attention to your dreams?

Ungraded set pic: Nathan Meister in the passenger seat c/- director Jonathan King.

St Valentine's Day massacres

The victim who has been hacked to death and left in the Bayou is an analogue for the movie itself of In the Electric Mist, based on the James Lee Burke novel. Directed by Betrand Tavernier, Tommy Lee Jones's Dave Robicheaux remains too faithful to the character, which has panicked the studio to cut the narrative in an effort to get things moving -- a mistake, because detective novels are all about sitting around. But the movie still works. It has Burke's voice, and his atmosphere and his landscape, with its sudden, emotional bursts of colour. In The Electric Mist could have been Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans or No Country For Old Men but in its bones it's Chinatown, i.e. a movie that wants to be a crime novel: complicated and puzzling for most of its length until the resolution appears right where it started. Also: Kelly Macdonald. All movies with Kelly Macdonald in them are good movies.

It's taken me this long to see Before The Devil Knows You're Dead and if I had to draw up a list of the ten best noir movies I've seen it would come in at around number four. Sidney Lumet directed it and it's a fucking gem: modern, shabby, direct and as black as night. Shot in digital, interestingly, a long time before people were talking about that. If you like Black Widow, Against All Odds (one of the best remakes of Out Of The Past) or The Morning After you should really tuck into this. Lumet calls it a melodrama but it's realistic and dirty and moving. The DVD includes a good making of documentary featuring interviews with the cast, producers and director, but not author Kelly Masterson.

Shadows and fog

Some more thumbnails from the set of Realiti, the micro-budget SF movie that director Jonathan King is shooting around Wellington and parts of Auckland. Top to bottom: Miranda Manasiadis and Nathan Meister lurking in the shadows; Graham McTavish giving the news; Nathan Meister hearing it; and Michelle Langstone on her way to something that may or may not happen. Jonathan has been shooting in digital in real locations with found light and a crew so small I'm not sure whether to call it a guerilla or a skeleton.

Realiti is pared-back science fiction: my idea, when I wrote it, was that the characters would come into a room and just talk. I keep referring to it as a science fiction film with no special effects, although when Jonathan is through with it there will be some opticals: removal of objects, fiddling with backgrounds, that kinda thing. Much of our discussion about the movie is what it won't be, and what won't be in it. In many ways it's a noir... but more colourful than that: stranger.

I wrote the script for Jonathan a long time ago. We revived the project after putting our toes back in the water by making on a comic strip, City Lights, which I wrote and he drew. One of the many things I love about these images as they trickle through is the way they evoke the director's drawing style. It's a good sign, I think: evidence that the movie's visual style is evolving naturally.

These preview pics are very small and have not been graded. And the shoot is just coming up to halfway: there's a long way to go yet. But the actors are looking way cool and the footage is looking great. Build it simple, fly it slow...

Bedside reading

Crisscross

Director Jonathan King has wired some more production stills from REALITi: Aroha White as Jessamine; Michelle Langstone as Holly; Miranda Manasiadis and Nathan Meister as Meg and Vic. Currently shooting in Wellington: it's all coming together. I wrote the script years ago but only now do I realise that these were faces I had in mind.

Watch this: Space!

If you're in Wellington in the coming weeks and spot a film crew not on a $500+ million budget from Warner Brothers, it might be Jonathan King making REALITi, a new full-length feature film. Jonathan will be shooting with a small team in and around Wellington which, through the magic of cinema, will be transformed into a New Zealand city in the kind-of present day.

REALITi is a script I wrote for Jonathan in 2008. It's a talkie: a science fiction film with no special effects; an adult fantasy set in the New Zealand now. Pictured: Nathan Meister as Vic and Tim Wong as Lo.

The end of our elaborate plans, the end

Forbrydelsen (The Killing) III starts off as a mood piece with Sarah Lund too far in the background, crowded out by her male colleagues. Lund has become the formalist instead of the maverick, the passive spectator rather than the active investigator, the weakling. Once she was driven: now she's just upset. The red herrings and interruptions are dispensed professionally to the point of routine. (Does anyone in Lundland ever finish a phone call?) Creator Søren Sveistrup shares the scripting duties this time around, presumably for scheduling reasons. The series feels like he hammered out a synopsis and the other writers fluffed it up. But things get going in the last four episodes, when Forbrydelsen suddenly becomes very good again. Stick it out for Sofie Gråbøl's performance and a tidy wrap up. Spoiler alert: everyone's fucked. Not a happy ending, but a good one.

Sveistrup talked to Holy Moly about creating the series:

When we started there were a lot of episodic crime shows. You know, these 45-minute shows with a heroine who solved the case and caught the killer and started dating the forensic guy, wearing heels. And I thought ‘well we won’t do that and we’ll try to do it more like a novel.’ Television is a great window to the world but it’s often used to do nothing. So I thought if somebody offers me this window, at least I can do my best. I can try not to be a recipe, I can try not to imitate the Americans or the English and try to do something original. Try, try, try.

He wanted Lund to be the strong, silent type:

She doesn't really talk much. She has to have these characters around her to push her into saying anything. The partner role is very important as it generates some pressure on Lund and pushes her in other directions. If she was just alone she would be speechless. And it's to show her annoyance with other people. She is always annoyed when the phone rings and that's part of the game: to annoy Lund.

Sveistrup has compared Lund to Clint Eastwood's Harry Callaghan:

I've always been fond of Clint Eastwood. The parts he plays are so silent, sometimes a bit biblical. If you watch Dirty Harry he's not especially likeable and I like that paradox about a character.

Director Birger Larsen said he modelled Lund on Clint Eastwood's The Man With No Name:

"I wanted her to be wearing a poncho like Clint Eastwood and I worked with that for many weeks. But Sofie said that she couldn't draw her gun. I said, 'if Clint Eastwood can do it, then you can do it as well'. But she said, 'no, it's not right'. And she looked so wonderful, so sexy, so good in the poncho. Exactly the Clint Eastwood one. She came along one day and said, 'I've got this sweater, perhaps we should use that'."

There are nods in the final episode to a certain Swedish trilogy. Sveistrup told Holy Moly that his influences also include the Mark Frost / David Lynch series Twin Peaks:

"The first episode of Twin Peaks begins with the discovery of the body of Laura Palmer and the first episode of The Killing ends with the discovery of the body of Nanna Birk Larsen. But I saw a lot of shows before we started writing and shooting. I was a big Twin Peaks fan when it was first shown and week after week I couldn't wait for the episodes, but then I guess I was a bit disappointed when the resolution happened. But today I can see that David Lynch was deconstructing the whole genre, and he was actually making a comedy. And in that sense it's perfect.

"I wanted to see if I could do it with no humour. And especially taking the parents into it, and their grief, I wanted to see if I could portray it in a more realistic way instead. So I think I owe a lot to Twin Peaks but it's an entirely different genre. We couldn't invent things like throwing a stone to decide where the investigation went – which must've been fun to come up with in the writing room – we couldn't do that. We had to stay loyal to the grief and the importance of the investigation."