Breaking the bank

Clive Owen, Naomi Watts and Tom
Tykwer on their globe-trotting financial
thriller The International

CASH RULES EVERYTHING AROUND THEM:
Watts and Owen

by MARK SLUTSKY

The timing certainly couldn’t be better for The International. A border-blurring corporate espionage thriller, its main villain is neither a rogue state nor sinister terrorist operation: it’s a bank, at a time when banks are pretty much the number one bad guys in real life as well.

“It’s incredible how timely it is,” says International co-star Clive Owen, at a press event for the movie in Beverly Hills. “You consider they were honing the script for two years, and that we filmed it over a year ago—what’s happened in the last year, with banks, the way the attention’s on them now and the way people are looking at them. When I was sent the script, I was sent a lot of research that it was based on as well. A huge part of the movie is saying, let’s look at banks and are they using people’s money appropriately, are they completely sound institutions—and the whole world’s doing that at the moment.”

“It’s very scary, isn’t it?” says Naomi Watts, who plays opposite Owen. “With what’s going on right now, I made several calls to my business manager and said, what do we need to do here? Should I bring around a few briefcases?”

That said, you’d never mistake the film for a sober examination of the credit crisis. Directed by Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run), The International is, true to its name, the kind of exotic-location-heavy global thriller characteristic of this post-Bourne moment in suspense movie history. Owen plays an Interpol agent, who, along with American assistant D.A. Watts, is on the trail of a powerful multinational bank with ties to weapons dealing and who will do anything to stay above the reach of the law (or pesky regulators, you’d assume). Beautifully shot by longtime Tywker collaborator Frank Griebe, the movie’s locations—from Switzerland to New York to Istanbul—are practically characters themselves, striking backdrops against which the actors play out their pursuit.

“The International is really a film about a guy who’s struggling like a fly in the spider web of these organizations that he’s fighting,” Tykwer says. “The idea was to give you this feeling that there’s this massive structure that he’s trying to attack, and how perfect it is and how structured it is and that he’s struggling and struggling and there seems to be no way to really fight it. Therefore we always needed that combination of distance and closeness.”

Museum (set) piece

That’s perhaps best exemplified by the movie’s bravura set piece, a shoot-out in the iconic rotunda of New York’s Guggenheim Museum. “It was incredibly well-planned and put together,” Owen says. “We were walking around the Guggenheim months before shooting, Tom talking to me about how he envisaged the scene, we were walking up the rotunda and he had the whole thing really exquisitely planned out.

“I remember the first full-blown rehearsal gearing up to start shooting the film, with stunt guys and everything, and we just mapped it all out, we got a really strong feeling at the end that if he comes anywhere near this, it’s going to be an amazing sequence. The thing about it is that it’s not just getting everyone in there and shooting up the Guggenheim. It’s ever-developing. You go in there and things keep changing and developing and it gets crazier and crazier but it always has this forward momentum. It’s one of the most exquisitely realized scenes I’ve been involved in.”

“It’s the most insane set piece I’ve ever done,” confirms Tykwer.

As for The International’s internationalism, Owen says, “I’ve never travelled so much on a movie as this one. All the locations were great. Really amazing locations. The end of the movie, which is on the roof of the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul, was originally scripted as ‘They go down an alleyway and there’s nowhere else to go so they have this showdown.’ So, Tom’s in Turkey, looking for this alleyway, and the location manager says ‘Let me show you this.’ So he takes him into the Grand Bazaar, through a shop, out the back, up some steps where this incredible world was revealed—this whole network of pathways on the roofs of the Grand Bazaar, with a mosque at either end. No one’s ever shot up there before.”

THE INTERNATIONAL OPENS THIS
FRIDAY, FEB. 13