Rainforest outside of Manaus. Photograph: Galen Rowell/Corbis

When Werner Herzog was asked to make a second film in the Amazon rainforest, after his delirious classic Aguirre, the Wrath of God, he wasn't initially enamoured with the idea, until he heard the story of a rubber baron at the turn of the last century, who dismantled a riverboat and carried it overland through the jungle, from one tributary to another. He also learned of the Teatro Amazonas, an improbable, neo-classical opera house in the Brazilian city of Manaus, built at the height of the rubber boom. Putting the two elements together, the director had his crazy conceit.

While shooting Fitzcarraldo, Herzog had to contend with a border war, a tribe who attacked his cast with arrows, the logistical nightmare of hauling his own boat through the forest, and his demented star, Klaus Kinski, whom the native extras offered to kill on his behalf. Herzog declined, only because he needed Kinski for a few more scenes. Continue reading...

The sun sets on the Hollywood sign. Photo: Reed Saxon/AP

Sadly, this is my last regular LA Diary and so I've been taking a wistful look back over the past 21 months.

Although not without its tough times, moving to California has been the best decision I've ever made in terms of creativity.

This sprawling disconnected city is most definitely not for everyone but I've thrived in the sunshine, the enthusiasm people have for film and the chance to dip my toe into an industry that is notoriously fickle and cutthroat.

I flew here with just two suitcases but big dreams of making movies. Against all odds (I've never had any formal training after film school twice rejected my application) I've done that.

I want to make my living as a screenwriter and although I'm not there yet, I feel it's so close I can almost touch it. Continue reading...

I was once went to a screening of William Castle's 1959 chiller The Tingler, hoping to finally smash the fourth wall by braving "Percepto", the electric device the director famously installed under the audience's seats to better transmit the jolts of Pure Terror felt by the characters on screen. Unfortunately, the budget of my trusty Cardiff arthouse cinema didn't stretch this far — and despite the late appearance of fellow hopeful gimmick Emergo! during the screening of House On Haunted Hill — I left disappointed; surer than ever that cinema will always be a two-sense, sound-and-vision experience. Disabling either one, as in this week's Blindness, can focus a story purposefully; but if touch, taste or smell come into play, then film-makers have a fight on their hands to achieve tangible close contact.

1) It's easy to write off 1975's Deafula — apparently the only full-length film wholly acted in American sign language — off as another gimmick, but this clip does bizarrely have some of the weird gestural power of the silent horror greats. The 'tache is pure 70s, though. Continue reading...

Hanging on by his fingernails ... Matt Damon in Bourne Identity

Hollywood makes no secret of its affection for the franchise. "If I could make all my films from franchises, I would," Bob Weinstein, the usually rather media-shy co-chairman of the Weinstein Company said earlier this year.

So it's hardly surprising that Universal is seeking to capitalise on its three-film Jason Bourne series, which has so far made the company more then $1bn at the worldwide box office. The studio announced today that it has bought the rights to the character outright from the estate of the late Robert Ludlum, who wrote three books about him. Continue reading...

I rise at 5am for the train to Sheffield Doc/Fest where Mark Cousins has been granted the early-morning slot to introduce Britain to the films of Shinsuke Ogawa.

Who he? Only a legend in Japanese documentary circles. I first heard whispers of his work while in California, where a screening of one part of his epic Sanrizuka series of films (deemed by historian Abé Mark Nornes "the War and Peace of cinema") had to be cancelled because no print was available. None of his films are on DVD (though a film about Ogawa – by In the Realm of the Senses' Nagisa Oshima – and a film completed a decade after his death can be found on a small US label, for $400 a pop). Doc/Fest showed three Ogawa movies from the early 1970s, by their reckoning all UK premieres. Continue reading...

Perfect casting? ... Robert Carlyle and Leonard Rossiter. Photos: Murdo Macleod/Allstar

So, Robert Carlyle might play Leonard Rossiter on the big screen. "He's a fucking genius," he tells the Guardian. "I would love to play him. And, would you believe, I get an email from a guy in London saying they were starting to make a biopic of Leonard Rossiter, so I'm going to see the treatment."

As a fellow Rossiter fan, it's news to fill you with equal parts dread and pleasure. The first because, if you squint hard enough, you can sort of see it already: the big tics, the prosthetic nose, the potential casting of Liz Hurley as Joan Collins. Continue reading...

A peevish Peter Pan ... Leonardo DiCaprio showing off his bum-fluff. Photo: Reuters

When will Ridley Scott learn that you can't send a boy to do a man's job? His Kingdom of Heaven was scuppered from the start thanks to the casting of that vapid slip Orlando Bloom in the leading role of a heroic crusader. Now here comes Body of Lies which installs Leonardo DiCaprio as Bloom's modern-day equivalent: a hardball CIA operative on a mission to the Middle East. He hurries through the carnage sporting a bum-fluff beard and the irritated air of a youth who can't find his trousers and is running late for the high-school prom. He's going to catch hell from Mary-Anne and Biff.

But here's the thing. DiCaprio actually turned 34 a few days ago. On paper he is easily old enough to play these kind of professional tough guys, men who have been around the block a time or two (after all, his Body of Lies co-star Russell Crowe was two years younger when he starred as a brutish cop in LA Confidential). Yet here he is, this peevish Peter Pan, seemingly trapped in perpetual late-adolescence. He's the leader of an ageing Hollywood boy band that counts Tobey Maguire and Jake Gyllenhaal as its junior partners and worships at the feet of the great Michael J Fox. Continue reading...

Heading for the big screen? ... Rio Ferdinand and a scene from RocknRolla. Photograph: Ben Stansall/Getty

There have been moments in UK film history when famous figures have ridden to the rescue - ensuring funding for features without which we would have been the poorer. George Harrison's determination to see Monty Python's The Life of Brian make it into cinemas springs to mind.

Far be it from me to pour scorn on the latest band of crusaders - but I'm not so sure that Premier League footballers deciding the future of British film output is such a good idea. The Hollywood Reporter has a story that Rio Ferdinand and Ashley Cole, of Manchester United and Chelsea respectively, have provided financial backing for Dead Man Running, a new British film set in Manchester and London's East End. The pair will also march on board as executive producers. Continue reading...

Practice makes perfect ... scene from Alexander Mackendrick's The Ladykillers. Photograph: Kobal

In Belle Toujours, Manoel de Oliveira's exquisite and ingeniously titled quasi-sequel to Belle du Jour, there is a long-ish sequence (relative to the film's 68 minutes) of a performance of the third and fourth movements of Dvorak's Symphony No 8 by L'Orchestre de la Fondation Calouste Gulbenkian, conducted by Lawrence Foster. I detail this because it is one of the rare extended sequences of classical music in a film, to which the characters listen intently, without talking.

Another contemplative drama released at the same time, Jean Becker's Conversations with My Gardener, also uses music diegetically, in this case the second movement of Mozart's Clarinet Concerto in A major, to make a poignant cultural point.

Why is it so uncommon for characters in films to listen to classical music? Unfortunately, this is a reflection of the pervasiveness of pop music. In films, the music regurgitating from radios and CD is, more likely than not, pop. One day, a radical film-maker will show a non-wimpish teenager listening to Schoenberg while reading Kierkegaard. Continue reading...

Head to head ... Christian Bale in Terminator Salvation and Chris Pine in Star Trek

In terms of science fiction franchises, it would be hard to find two more diametrically opposed creatures than Terminator and Star Trek. The former is built on a dystopian grey and silver vision of humanity's future, the other is all bright, Apollo-era primary coloured optimism.

What the two do have in common is that they are both returning to our cinema screens next year - less than a month apart, in fact - with make-or-break reboots. Last week, JJ Abrams turned up in London to talk about Star Trek and show footage to a baying audience of his new movie, which casts new actors in the iconic roles of the original crew of the starship Enterprise. This week Terminator Salvation's McG did exactly the same. Continue reading...

Picture palace ... the Renoir Cinema in Brunswick Square, London. Photograph: Suki Dhanda

It would be an exaggeration to say that a part of me died when I heard that London's lovely Renoir cinema is soon to be known as the Curzon Bloomsbury, but it certainly made me wince. This is one of the capital's smartest venues: a plush two-screener run by the Artificial Eye group and specialising in foreign-language releases.

It opened as the Renoir in 1986, though it had been operational as a cinema, under various names, since its launch as the Bloomsbury Cinema in 1972. When I first went there in 1987, to see Lasse Hallström's My Life as a Dog, I marvelled at its place in the cradle of the otherwise desolate Brunswick Centre, which resembled the sort of labyrinthine estate through which Regan and Carter of The Sweeney might routinely pursue teenage roister-doisters and leather-faced lags. This setting seemed only to underline the Renoir's air of undemonstrative sophistication. Things are different now. The Renoir is flanked on all sides by every coffee house and cafe franchise you can name short of Spud U Like, and so its imminent rebranding can't help but seem like a reflection of the encroaching homogeneity of the area. Continue reading...

Outside Hollywood, no one can hear you scream ... a still from the indie film We Are the Strange

In Hollywood, as everyone is fond of quoting William Goldman, no one knows anything. Outside the dream factory, in the independent film world, the buzz is that "the sky is falling", as Mark Gill of the film department now famously proclaimed at the Los Angeles film festival in June.

Gill argued that the combination of a glut of production, rising release costs, retrenching investors and fickle audiences had made it near-impossible to maintain an independent film business – and the only way to beat the odds, he concluded, is to "work a lot harder, be a lot smarter, know a lot more, move a lot faster, sell a lot better, pay attention to the data, be a little nicer (ok, a lot nicer), trust your gut, read everything and never, ever give up". Continue reading...

Steve Buscemi, John Goodman and Jeff Bridges in The Big Lebowski. Photo: Kobal

On Saturday night, a guy walked into Café Amore's on 14th Street as I was leaving. He wore straggly, shoulder-length hair, a goatee, an old, grey hoodie, pyjama bottoms and sandals. On balance, he looked less like a guy than a dude – the Dude, in fact. Plainly, he was headed round the corner to the Fillmore NY, normally a music venue but host that night of the opening part of the Lebowksi festival New York 2008.

Starring Jeff Bridges as Jeffrey "The Dude" Lebowksi, the Coen brothers' 1998 movie The Big Lebowski combines stoner comedy and noir pastiche with a celebration of life's simple pleasures, such as friendship, bowling and White Russians. Ten years after its inauspicious release, this offbeat gem inspires more devoted – even obsessive – appreciation than any other recent film. Lebowski Fest, as it's known, has become established as the main artery through which that devotion flows. Continue reading...

It ain't Lara Croft, but Max Payne managed to rake in £1m on opening

Faced with a third weekend of Quantum of Solace, distributors once again declined to offer up any top-tier commercial competition – a sensible policy, given that 007 took another £5m chunk of box office over the three days. But Twentieth Century Fox will be pleased that its videogame adaptation, Max Payne sneaked into seven figures for second place, with an opening weekend of £1,004,995. Although far from Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (which debuted in July 2001 with £3.85m), the Max Payne result compares favourably with openings for recent videogame flicks such as Doom (£612,000 in December 2005) and Silent Hill (£992,000 in April 2006).

Disney's High School Musical 3: Senior Year clings on at No 3 in the chart, and its £21.24m gross to date earns it the distinction of being the second biggest musical of all time at the UK box office - behind Mamma Mia! (with £67.8m), but it has overtaken Moulin Rouge! (£18.5m), Chicago (£16.4m) and Evita (£14.2m). Disney's London office will be basking in approbation from its corporate parent since HSM3's US gross of $84m (£55.8m) suggested a UK gross closer to £8.5m, but Britain has far exceeded expectations. Continue reading...

Not so hot ... Zack and Miri Make a Porno

With that provocative title, and the fact that it brings together two of the highest profile names in US comedy, Zack and Miri Make a Porno was always going to have the critics dribbling with anticipation. But like a bad one-night stand, the reality doesn't seem to have lived up to the fantasy: Kevin Smith's collaboration with Seth Rogen has its funny moments, but most reviewers have been left faintly dissatisfied. It looked good in the bar with the lights down low and a firestorm of booze in the belly, but it's a pretty plain-looking creature in the cold light of morning. Continue reading...