The Reeler waited with its red-carpet colleagues no fewer than two-and-a-half hours Tuesday night to get a word with the principals behind Lucky Number Slevin, the buzz-wielding New York gangster noir premiering at the Ziegfeld Theater. Two-and-a-half hours for principals who trickled in for a screening that started at least an hour late. Two-and-a-half hours with a Josh Hartnett here or a Lucy Liu there, ostensibly sympathetic publicists retrieving soda from the upstairs lobby for reporters and with the 10 of us on line wondering if Bruce Willis would ever return from doing TV interviews out in the tent on 54th Street.
In the meantime, I caught up with director Paul McGuigan, a Scotland native who downplayed the impact of the city’s noir mythology. ” People make movies other places,” he told me. “We made ours in Montreal, then came down here for a week or so and shot on the streets. Mostly East Village, Lower East Side, a little in the West Village.”
Yeah, well, New York was still a fairly integral character that you had to direct in a way, wasn’t it?
“Oh, New York City was the character,” McGuigan said. “(Screenwriter) Jason Smilovic was walking down the road in the West Village and he saw these two big buildings with opposing facades. And that started the cool idea of one guy in one of them and one guy in a penthouse and their rival gangsters, and that’s how it starts. New York is actually the genesis of the whole script.”
I asked the filmmaker about his own vision for portraying a city moviegoers have watched onscreen for more than a century. “To me, there’s a lot of the city that I like that perhaps people take for granted,” he said. “I like going across the bridge with the big wide lenses, you know. I like showing New York as wide as you can. It’s actually quite hard to shoot unless you shoot from the air; you have to keep the plane wide to get everything in because there’s such a vastness to it. That was my approach.”
McGuigan was less expressive about his NYC noir influences. “None.”
What? None?
“I had no influences.”
You had no influences?
“Nuh-uh. No.”
This alone seemed discussion-worthy, but Willis bounded up the stairs behind McGuigan and that was pretty much the end of that interview. Willis put his arm around his director and called him the “number-one reason I wanted to work on this movie.”
OK, OK, enough of that. Bruce, you’ve been a bad-ass on a lot of bad-ass movie posters. Is this Slevin one the baddest-assed or what?
“I’ve never seen this poster,” he told me, stepping back to look behind McGuigan at the one-sheet taped to the outside of a glass poster box. “Oh, wow. Jesus. It’s awesome.”
Let’s say compared to Die Hard, Last Boy Scout, on the bad-ass scale of 1-10–
“I wouldn’t compare it to anything. It’s pretty cool. Last question?”
Such a politician. And to think he would give the quote of the century after a 150-minute wait! Silliness. Even sillier was the moment immediately after that, when one of the tabloid reporters asked Willis how he deals with all those pesky Petra Nemcova stories.
“I don’t pay any attention to them. But thanks for asking!”
And then, like my earlier dream of a swift, painless death, Willis was gone. This is the best job in the world. No worries, however–The Reeler will be catching up with most of the Lucky Number Slevin crew again later this week and will bring you a little more resonant burst of coverage the week of Slevin‘s April 7 release.

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