The juxtaposition of classic Hollywood films with Colin Farrell in “Sugar” was unscripted
One of the hallmarks of the new Apple TV+ series “Sugar” is the way it intercuts scenes from classic Hollywood films into its current story of Detective John Sugar (Colin Farrell). While the technique is new, if not experimental, the connections being made are clear: Sugar is a cinephile obsessed with old Hollywood films, while creator Mark Protosevich’s neo-noir series is steeped in the tropes of these black-and-white films of the 1940s and 1950s. (The first episode contains clips “Kiss Me Deadly” and “The Big Heat.”)
The connections are very strong, the intercuts work well, and the real surprise is that Protosevich, a cinephile, didn’t write it.
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“It was all done after the fact, so I had no idea until I saw how many clips (and) they used,” Farrell told IndieWire. All-time favorites, like “Sunset Boulevard” and “The Maltese Falcon.” “It’s a really interesting juxtaposition for me, as a fan of the movie and a fan of this story.”
The irony is that this crossover was the brainchild of two Brazilian directors, director Fernando Meirelles and his editor Fernando Stutz, who were not well-versed in the noir films on which the director was drawing.
“The first thing Mark did was give me 15 films to watch, to start our conversation,” said Meirelles, who admitted to the screening director at their first meeting that he was not very familiar with film noir. I watched them non-stop, and loved it. One of the things I loved about the script, after watching the movies, was that I recognized a lot of lines from different movies, or specific situations from a movie, that were in the script.
Stutz also lavished on Protosevich’s 15-film duties, then went so far as to watch more, immersed in the world of noir when footage from the shoot started flowing into his editing room.
“And then, as you’re cutting, sometimes you think, ‘Oh, well, Sugar’s discovering something here, I remember Peter Lorre did (it),” Stutz said, referring to the great 1940s Hollywood actor who would appear in A later episode of “Sugar”.
“I’m always grateful to (Meirelles) because he encourages me to experiment, he’s not afraid, so I just started combining the two,” said Stutz, an experimental film student. “The uniqueness of what we do and the medium in which we work is the clash of images. I’m very interested in bringing these different sources together and seeing what impact they have.
The editor’s first experiences registered immediately with Meirelles, who encouraged Stutz to try harder. The two collaborators naturally talked throughout production, and their conversations began to focus increasingly on the connections between what the directors were shooting and the films they had seen. For Meirelles, making the visual connections in “Sugar” and its effects fit his understanding of the character, which is why the crossover works so well.
“Listening to Sugar’s backstory, as Mark told me, he was like an anthropologist, (except) Sugar watched a lot of movies to understand (people),” Meirelles said. “So every time he does something, the specific actions remind him of something he saw. The black and white entries are what he has in mind.
Licensing old films isn’t cheap, and there are estates of former stars who have denied the use of their likeness. Meirelles and Stutz estimated that 30 to 40 percent of the old films they initially used would have to be replaced. To save money, Stutz replaced some classic film footage with vintage footage, especially shots of driving and traveling through Los Angeles. Although he was disappointed that he had to give up some of his work, he was surprised at how easy it was to find replacements.
“It’s funny because there are a lot of similarities that we don’t know about,” Stutz said. “Sugar is a self-reflexive project, and it’s a very good excuse to think about filmmaking and its tropes. That’s part of the beauty for me, you notice how the language of film evolves, and in a way it doesn’t.”
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