What comes to mind when you think of deceit, Mini Coopers, an ingenious plot to steal Italian gold and revenge? Could it be "The Italian Job?" Both the 1969 version (starring Michael Caine) and the 2003 remake (starring Mark Wahlberg) will be screened at the upcoming Virginia Film Festival. Although the two films have the same basic premise, each has a unique character.
Both movies follow the life of thief Charlie Croker as he attempts to steal millions of dollars worth of Italian gold. The sequence of events, however, are what distinguish the films from one another.
The original 1969 version commences with Croker (Caine), a British ex-con, being released from prison. Once he is released, he learns of an operation, hatched by his friend, in which he could steal 4 million dollars worth of Gold from Italy. Unfortunately, his friend was killed before he could complete the operation. After being financially backed by a rich and powerful -- yet very "British" -- crime lord, Mr. Bridger, Croker goes to Italy to attempt one of the biggest crimes in history.
The 2003 remake creates a totally different spin on the crime. The film begins with a band of American thieves (Wahlberg, Mos Def, Edward Norton and Seth Green) stealing roughly $37 million in gold from an Italian bank, using an intricate and technologically advanced plan. When it looks like the group has made a clean get away, one of the members turns on the team, takes the gold and kills one of the thieves.
One year later, the remaining members of the team, along with the daughter of the man killed (Charlize Theron), are hungry for revenge and they generate a plot to steal their gold back.
Although the remake is only loosely based on the original, there are some consistencies which pay homage to the original. Both movies use Mini Coopers as the getaway vehicles, and in both films the cars make enormous leaps. The remake also utilizes a scheme in which they take control of traffic lights and create a total gridlock of traffic in order to heist an armored truck carrying the gold.
The 2003 remake is far superior to the original. The incredible script, written by Wayne and Donna Powers (who were scheduled to make an appearance at the festival, but due to illness can no longer attend), has more substance, more meaning, more emotion and better action than the 1969 version. The Charlie Croker that Wahlberg portrays seems more intelligent, more mysterious and more composed than the loud, horny, Austin Power-esque thief that Caine plays.
The real genius of the remake though is that it manipulates the plot in such a manner that the audience is captured and at the edge of their seats throughout the entire film. You have never seen so many twists in one movie, which keeps the action fresh for the two-hour duration. It is this quality that the original lacks. The audience feels compelled to either fast forward or completely stop the film halfway through.
Staff writer Tim Ciesco spoke to the scriptwriters of the 2003 "Italian Job," Donna and Wayne Powers.
CD: What is it like writing the script for the remake of a movie? What difficulties or problems do you encounter when taking on a project like "The Italian Job?"
DP: Paramount Pictures and film's producer, Donald DeLine, sent us the original film, which we had not seen before. We watched it one time only, because we wanted to understand the tone of the original and what we thought were the icons of it (the Minis, the traffic jam) but we did not want to make a carbon copy of it. The original film is on DVD, so our feeling was there was no point in writing something that wasn't its own thing. So we changed the story and the characters, but we made to sure to keep the fun, popcorn-movie tone of the original.
CD: What made you want to take on writing the script for "The Italian Job?"
DP: We had not written a heist movie before, and we like jumping to different genres, especially if we think we can make the genres character-based. We like the idea of writing about some criminals, but in a non-gritty, light, fun way.
CD: Where did you get the inspiration for Seth Green's character (that he was the real Napster)?
WP: While writing "The Italian Job," I was very into Napster and downloading songs -- now that I can pay for them, on iTunes, I do -- and I had read about how Shawn Fanning called it Napster because his hair was nappy. Somehow, I just thought it would be funny if it was called Napster because he liked to nap a lot, which somehow led me to thinking about a character who was napping when Shawn stole his idea for a program (or at least that's how Seth Green's character would see it.)
A lot of people thought we should remove those references because they were afraid that Napster was out of date, closed down. We kept insisting that it was part of the vernacular now and the audience would laugh, and fortunately, we were right.
CD: How do you go about creating the plans for each of the jobs that the group carries out in the film? Do you base them on real cases, and is there any kind of special research that goes on that helps you devise each of the plots?
DP: On this project, we imagined what we would like to see happen visually, and then we did research to try to match up what we imagined to something that would be possible. We do a lot of research on the Internet, and sometimes a simple search on Google, like Traffic Control Center, will turn out to be a Godsend.
CD: When you see the final cuts of the movies you've done, are they how you envisioned them when you originally wrote the scripts for them? What kind of effect does this have on a screenwriter?
WP: There are two types of films we do, ones that I direct ("Skeletons in the Closet," "Out of Order") and ones that we write but don't produce or direct. When I direct, it tends to turn out much more closely to how I imagined it in my head, so it's a more fulfilling experience. On "The Italian Job," we were lucky because the screenplay was shot as we wrote it, so it came out very close to what we'd imagined, and, because it was a big budget film, it came out even better in some cases because the scope of it was so large. So the canvas of the scene early in the film where the crew is toasting their success in the Alps was even more exciting than we'd envisioned.
CD: Is there one particular part of "The Italian Job" that you two are extremely proud of?
DP: It's very enjoyable to watch a movie that you've written and to see that the audience is being manipulated in exactly the way you want them to be manipulated. They're stunned when Donald Sutherland's character meets his fate; they applaud when the armored truck falls; they laugh when Seth Green's character insists that he's the Napster. So we're proud of the whole film.
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