John Orloff got his break writing two episodes of the Emmy-winning HBO mini-series Band of Brothers. His latest script is another true-life tale -- Michael Winterbottom's A Mighty Heart, just out on DVD. Heart focuses on Mariane Pearl (Angelina Jolie), a reporter whose husband Daniel, an American journalist, was kidnapped and murdered in Pakistan. The script just earned Orloff an Independent Spirit Award nomination for Best First Screenplay. The awards will be held on February 23rd.

Cinematical: When did you know you wanted to be a writer?

John Orloff: I still don't know whether I want to be a writer! I went to UCLA Film School, and I had a great writing teacher who thought I had a particular skill in that department. So I kept taking that teacher for the whole time I was at UCLA, kept on writing. At the end of it I was 22, it was the late 80s, and people weren't really hiring young writers, so I started to work in advertising. Spent about ten years miserably working in commercials, until I met a woman -- who is now my wife -- who was working in the business as a development exec at HBO. And she was bringing home all these screenplays, and they were horrible! Just awful! And these people had agents, and they were working. So I pitched my wife a non-fiction movie that I had been thinking about writing for ten years, with the incredibly commercial idea of a sixteenth century English melodrama. It was actually about the Shakespeare authorship issue -- who wrote the plays? I wrote the script and had the misfortune of writing it two months before Shakespeare in Love came out. But I sent out this script, trying to get an agent, and did finally get "hip-pocketed" by an agency.

Cinematical: And that script eventually got you your big break with Tom Hanks -- pretty decent guy to start out with, no?

JO: Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg, yes! The most important thing that happened out of the Shakespeare script was that Tom's company was among the readers. They liked it, and I met with Tom about another project, but every time I sat down with him I would ask if he had hired writers on Band of Brothers. I'm a huge World War II buff, and I think I eventually just wore him down. He finally asked me to write a script, and I wrote one episode. He was very happy with it and asked me to write another. So, that was my first paying gig.

When it comes time to nominate the best actress performances of 2007, Angelina Jolie might be overlooked. Though the film is at times confusing as it rushes to release all the facts without much of an explanation, it's Jolie's take on the real-life widow of slain journalist Daniel Pearl (Dan Futterman), Mariane Pearl, that ultimately lifts A Mighty Heart up above some of the other "based on a true story" flicks that have hit screens in the past year. Featured in practically every scene of the film, it's hard to take your eyes off Jolie -- and it's hard not to lose yourself in the character, the real-life woman, who spent weeks holed up in a house awaiting word on her kidnapped husband while doing what she could to track him down herself.

By now, we all know the story and the outcome: On January 23, 2002, Daniel Pearl, a journalist for the Wall Street Journal, was kidnapped in Kirachi, Pakistan while heading to what he thought was an interview with Sheikh Mubarak Ali Gilani at the Village restaurant in Kirachi. At some point he was intercepted by a militant group calling themselves The National Movement for the Restoration of Pakistani Sovereignty, and for the next month, a group of people (including Pearl's wife Mariane, his friend Asra, a Pakistani Captain, the FBI and others) use the house they were staying at as a make-shift headquarters as they attempt to hunt down the men responsible and find Danny before it's too late.

Even with a big star like Angelina Jolie, A Mighty Heart is not performing too well at the box office (less than $8 million in two weeks). For most releases, such disappointment would signal the end of a theatrical run. However, instead of pulling the film completely and hoping for better business on video, Paramount Vantage is attempting to jumpstart its battery. This weekend the studio is removing A Mighty Heart from many of its screens, dropping its theater count from 1,350 down to 651. Basically the film has been taken out of markets it isn't doing so well in; now maybe the buzz will grow in stronger areas and later the film can go back to a wider release. Even in the limited release, though, the film is bound to face strong competition from other well-received indies like Sicko, Once and La Vie en rose. Still, Paramount Vantage is going to really push this one in hopes that it will eventually find its audience. Paramount is also pushing for a heavy awards campaign for A Mighty Heart, and so it probably wants the slow buildup and long run kind of success that Crash achieved two years ago. The studio is still planning for the film's DVD to come out in time for Oscar voters.

I still haven't seen A Mighty Heart, but I had planned on going last night. Unfortunately, my local theater didn't have a showtime between 5:15pm and 10:30pm because it shares a screen with La Vie en rose (it seems Transformers is hogging most of the screens, even in NYC). So, instead I finally saw Knocked Up. Because I'm such a tardy moviegoer, I have to appreciate strategies where a movie is allowed long-term play. I still need to see Sicko and La Vie en rose and Once and many others that will hopefully be around for awhile. If only more distributors could recognize people like me who don't contribute to opening weekend grosses and would let other well reviewed movies stick around a little longer.

Last week's Manhattan junket for A Mighty Heart was fairly routine -- not at all a paparazzi circus, despite the fact that that press had known days in advance that Angelina Jolie was making the Waldorf Astoria her home base while in town to do publicity for the film. For those who are interested, I was never asked to sign any kind of agreement or contract whatsoever, and none of the other journalists doing roundtable interviews were, either. I think that kind of thing was restricted to journalists doing one on one interviews. The only out-of-the-ordinary thing that happened during the entire day was that the studio publicists made a big show of setting up their own tape recorder to record our conversation with Jolie, for what purpose I have no idea. Anyway, here is a sampling of some of the questions and answers batted back and forth during the roundtables. Some of the questions are mine, some are from the rest of the table. Enjoy.

Angelina Jolie

Playing a character who is not only real but also very involved -- what pressure does that put on you as an actress?

Huge pressure. So much so that I didn't sleep the night before and I questioned myself through the entire process of making this film. I respected her before I met her, when I saw how she handled the situation, just as a viewer watching CNN, and when I met her I discovered what a lovely woman, what a gracious person she is, what a great mom she is, and she's the last person I'd want to disappoint in any way. It was a huge responsibility to not just try to be her in the film, but to be her during the most difficult time of her life and to try to interpret her pain or her love for her husband. She had faith in me, that I would be the right person to do it, and I think without that I would never have taken the role.

What was your first meeting with her like?

Our initial meeting was before the film. We just had a play date. [laughs] The film was very much a second thought in our relationship. She was somebody who I liked as a woman and still think ... we have different things that in common that we want to work on internationally and domestically, and our kids like each other. So that's the most important reason for our friendship -- we get the kids together. It's strange for that to have evolved and for me to sit with her one day and to realize that we were going to do this and I was going to play her. It was strange -- it was very strange. She was wonderful. There's no vanity, and just believed that if everybody understood the book and understood the intention and why she lived her life the way she did, and what she and Danny represented, that if we understood that, then we would do our best and try. And as long as everybody tried their best, that was all she could ask. So she was the nicest person to work with, but because she had faith in us, it also made us that much more nervous.

A Mighty Heart takes an enormous gamble, and sinks or swims by it -- it tries to engage us in a meticulous police procedural, the outcome of which is already known to anyone watching the film. The film begins its action about an hour or so after Wall Street Journal South Asia bureau chief Daniel Pearl leaves his pregnant wife Mariane alone in their Karachi apartment to go to a meeting with a shady figure known as Sheik Gilani, who he suspects may have information on the 'shoe bomber' Richard Reid or may himself be a key terrorist figure. Like Daniel, Mariane is a journalist, and the two of them follow a strict procedure of regular call-ins when the other is off on a dangerous assignment. When Daniel misses one of these check-ins, Mariane springs into action, first reporting him missing to Pakistani authorities and later, to American agencies and the Wall Street Journal. Various players begin to flood into the apartment and the story, each of them taking somber mood cues from the tightly-wound, no-nonsense Mariane.

As Mariane, Angelina Jolie totes around a giant belly and a big pile of hair and sinks into the role of a traffic coordinator, constantly gauging the progress of the ad-hoc investigation into Daniel's disappearance and shuffling the other characters in and out of the main action. Early on, she creates a tree diagram on a blackboard to get a sense of where Daniel was going when he was abducted and who might have knowledge of his whereabouts. Pictures of 'persons of interest' are slapped up and yanked down. The movie demands your full attention as it unspools reams of information: names, places, events, and questions that must be answered if the crime will be foiled. I'm sure this is a true reflection of those sleepless weeks as Mariane Pearl remembered them in her book, but the sheer tonnage of investigative info A Mighty Heart presents us ends up crowding out Mariane and Daniel as people: their habits, their convictions, their unusual way of life. I know as little about those things now as I did before seeing the film.

Everyone's favorite entertainment journalist, Roger Friedman, is calling Angelina Jolie a hypocrite after she reportedly censored journalists while promoting her new film, A Mighty Heart. The Michael Winterbottom pic is about Mariane Pearl, widow of murdered Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, and it deals with freedom of the press, so the idea that Jolie made reporters sign a censoring agreement before interviewing her is certainly problematic. At the premiere of A Mighty Heart Wednesday night, Jolie's lawyer presented journalists with a contract stating certain subjects that could not be discussed with the actress, including questions about her personal life. Of course, this makes sense, because otherwise some writers would attempt to stray from the topic of the film in question -- which would take away from the promotion of the film, as well as from the purpose of the press' purpose at the event.

Still, the contract does seem unnecessary and contradictory to the film's apparent message. If Jolie wanted to reject a question or topic, she could certainly just refuse to comment or leave. Most of the junkets and red carpets I've been to, this has either been addressed or accepted as a given anyway. Instead, according to Friedman, the mode of dealing with gossippy reporters made a lot of people angry, enough to cancel coverage, as USA Today and the Associated Press supposedly did. Eventually Jolie ended up refusing all print interviews because of the outrage. Friedman also claims that Jolie instructed publicists to ban Fox News (for which Friedman works) from the red carpet and any other premiere access. In the end, though, some higher ups at Paramount allowed Fox's coverage. Friedman goes on to criticize Jolie's history of press manipulation and also quotes a disappointed editorial director from Reporters Without Borders, an organization that was supposed to be supported by the film's premiere.

[via Fark.com, which has a good discussion of the article going in its comments section]

Hope Davis has had a pretty remarkably consistent career considering the amount of work she's done, giving understated performances in a variety of great films. I loved her in two recent little-seen gems: The Matador and The Weather Man, and especially in American Splendor and About Schmidt -- which is one of my favorite films. She's got two movies due out this year: John August's The Nines, which I told you a bit about here, and Charlie Bartlett, a comedy with Robert Downey, Jr, due out August 3rd. Today brings more word on two upcoming projects for Davis. First, she has joined Synecdoche, New York, screenwriter extraordinaire Charlie Kaufman's directorial debut. Philip Seymour Hoffman will star and Davis joins an excellent (and very pale!) female supporting cast that includes Samantha Morton, Catherine Keener, Michelle Williams, and Tilda Swinton. Hoffman will play "a theater director in crisis over work and the women in his life," Davis will play his therapist. Synecdoche begins shooting this month.

After that project wraps, Davis will move on to Genova, a new film from Michael Winterbottom, director of the great Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story and 24 Hour Party People. Winterbottom also directed Angelina Jolie in A Mighty Heart, out this summer -- check out James' Cannes review of that film here. Monika told you about Davis' addition to the Genova cast last week. That film is a ghost story said to have mystery and horror elements. It tells the story of "a British man who moves with his two American daughters to Italy as he tries to recover from his wife's death." Davis will star alongside Colin Firth, Willa Holland of The OC and Perla Haney-Jardine of Spider-Man 3. Catherine Keener is in that one as well -- maybe she and Davis can share a cab from New York to Italy after the Kaufman film wraps.

I have to say that I love Michael Winterbottom's range. It's not every man who Welcome to Sarajevo, The Claim, 24 Hour Party People, A Cock and Bull Story, 9 Songs and A Mighty Heart on their resume. Not to mention the fact that he's trucking along with the movie making. He's got the upcoming Angelina Jolie flick, A Mighty Heart, on the way, as well as another true-story, overseas production, Murder in Samarkand, in the works. But in between the political turmoil, Winterbottom is looking into a ghostly story named Genova, as Christopher Campbell alerted us about in November.

The film is about a man who loses his wife and moves to Italy with his teen daughters, while suffering from haunting ghosts of his past. Colin Firth has been with the project for a while, but now the rest of the cast has been fleshed out. His co-stars are The Weather Man's Hope Davis and The 40 Year Old Virgin love interest Catherine Keener, and presumably one of them will be the wife who widowed him. As for his daughters, I assume they are the next two in the cast -- teen actress Willa Holland, who played Kaitlin Cooper on The O.C., and Perla Haney-Jardine, who was most recently Penny Marko in Spider-Man 3. Of course, Winterbottom says of the choices: "I am very excited about working with such wonderful actors in such a beautiful city. It is a story I have been working on for a while." The movie will begin shooting at the end of next month in, of course, Genova, Italy, as well as Boston. But I agree with Campbell -- I'm hoping gets back to the comedies before he gets into a drama groove.

Just yesterday, Monika posted about the Variety story by Alison James that Wong Kar Wai's English-language debut, My Blueberry Nights (and is it just me, or does Jude Law have the worst hair day ever in that pic from the film?), will likely open the upcoming Cannes Film Festival, along with a short list of other films expected to make the cut for the fest.

Over on Hollywood Elsewhere this morning, Jeff Wells (who also noted, correctly, that the lead in the Variety story is old news, having been rumored over on Cineuropa for a couple weeks) posted a short list of films that he thinks will get in -- and strongly admonished whoever might be paying attention over in France that if they don't make the cut, people will be very disappointed.

Wells' short list of English-language titles he expects to make it in includes Joel and Ethan Coen's No Country for Old Men, Todd Hayne's I'm Not There (aka, that Bob Dylan flick with seven actors playing different aspects of Dylan's persona), Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood (Daniel Day-Lewis and Paul Dano in an adaptation of an Upton Sinclair novel), and Michael Winterbottom's A Mighty Heart (the Daniel Pearl flick starring Angelina Jolie).

Just when you thought the IMDb was the greatest asset to movie lovers, the site has gone and revealed itself to be less a service to the cinematic community and more of a privilege from another corporate power worried about its public image. It isn't clear when the site instituted this, but as of today the IMDb has a search filter that makes it difficult to locate some titles, specifically pornographic or otherwise sexually explicit titles. These titles include the usual XXX fare, but also include more mainstream films like John Cameron Mitchell's Shortbus and Caligula, which stars Golden Globe winner Helen Mirren.

They aren't gone from the database, though. Shortbus can be found by way of Mitchell, who shows up when searched. The same goes for Caligula, which can be found in a roundabout way via its stars. But the IMDb isn't only filtering out the titles, it is also filtering out some performers who appear in adult titles. At least that's how it seems. The Rabbi Report experimented with the IMDb search and discovered that while most of the Shortbus cast doesn't show up, some large profile porn stars do show up. As further examples, I tested out the names Jenna Jameson, John Holmes and Ron Jeremy -- all were easily searched. Then I looked up The Brown Bunny and the documentary Inside Deep Throat -- neither was easily located.

Living in Austin makes it challenging to create a year-end Top Ten list. I feel like I ought to have until February to finalize the list, because a lot of acclaimed movies from 2006 won't be released in this town until early next year. Plus, I am still catching up on movies that did get an Austin release before the end of the year -- for example, I didn't get to see The Queen until Wednesday night. I know I've missed some very good movies that might show up on a later list (I am dying to see Sleeping Dogs Lie, for example). And on the flip side, I've seen some excellent movies this year that were technically released in 2005, like The Squid and the Whale, but didn't arrive in Austin until 2006. Throwing film festivals into the mix means that I've seen some wonderful films that won't be released until 2007, or that have no distributor yet and may not see theatrical release at all. It's strange how "2006" can seem like such a fluid term when you're a film critic who lives outside of New York/Los Angeles.

So this Top Ten list is charmingly inconsistent as to release dates. Let's not worry about that. The list is in alphabetical order, although I will mention which movie was my particular favorite ...

I don't know when the last time Michael Winterbottom took a vacation was, but considering the pace with which he's been putting out movies lately, it couldn't have been a long one. Currently he's directing Angelina Jolie in A Mighty Heart, and now he's got his next project all lined up to begin shooting in the spring. The film is called Genova, and it will star Colin Firth as a widowed man haunted by ghosts of his past while moving to Italy with his teen daughters.

Now, considering I'll watch anything Winterbottom does (I just hope he doesn't do any more semi-pornographic films) and I'll also watch anything Firth is in (yes, even What a Girl Wants), I guess I'll technically need to see this film twice. Not that I'll mind. I'm actually pretty excited to see how Winterbottom handles the contemporary ghost story genre, especially if he shoots it in his usual hand-held-plus-improv style, which could give it a fittingly uneasy tone.

How this news affects the IMDb-listed Winterbottom project Murder in Samarkand is unknown, though I wouldn't put it past the director to do them both next year, maybe back to back. He could just abandon or pass on the film, which will be based on Craig Murray's memoir "Murder in Samarkand: A British Ambassador's Controversial Defiance of of Tyranny in the War on Terror," considering it might too closely link itself, Heart and the brilliant The Road to Guantanamo as some sort of terror-torture trilogy (sounds catchy, but also sounds like the Saw films). If he does go forward and make it after Genova, let's hope the film maker is then ready for another comedy.

Welcome to Sarajevo ... Film Festival, that is. The Bosnian capital just had its 10th annual fest, and interestingly enough, the Uniqa Insurance Viewers Award (or Audience Award) went to The Road to Guantánamo, which was directed by Michael Winterbottom, who also made Welcome to Sarajevo. The top award, or Heart of Sarajevo, went to Das Fräulein, the feature debut of Swiss-born Andrea Staka, who is of Bosnian-Croatian heritage. The film, about three female immigrants from different sections of former Yugoslavia -- one Serbian, one Croatian, one Bosnian -- now living in Zurich, also took top honors at this year's Locarno International Film Festival in Switzerland. Hopefully an American distributor will pick up this title so we can add to its accolades.

Winner of an Honorary Heart of Sarajevo Award was Mike Leigh. The filmmaker was recognized for his "outstanding contribution to the art of cinema and the support to the development of the Sarajevo Film Festival." According to the festival's website, Leigh has been an important influence on the relationship between the British film industry and the cinema of the Balkan region, and on the success of the festival, which was founded in 1997, less than two years after its city had been devastated by war.

I wouldn't imagine that Michael Winterbottom (In This World; The Road to Guantanamo) is always good about getting the necessary permits and legal permissions when he's filming in foreign lands. Considering his practice of using small crews that can get in and out of locations easily, he probably works on too much of a whim. But for his next film, A Mighty Heart, which stars Angelina Jolie as the widow of slain journalist Daniel Pearl, and is being produced by Brad Pitt's production company, Winterbottom is probably going to have to follow more of Hollywood's practices with on-location shoots.

But this weekend, four security guards who were cast to play police officers in Heart, were arrested in Karachi, Pakistan, for unauthorized impersonation. Ali Mohammad, Amin, Mohammad Akram and Zahid Hussain were taken into custody by the Saddar Town police after the four men were spotted in police uniform, acting like police in front of the Sindh High Court. According to the report, the filmmakers had not gotten permission to shoot there or to have the "actors" portraying police officers.

From what I've heard, this film shouldn't be shooting yet. Considering there's no mention in the report of Winterbottom being on the scene, I am hoping that more details surface. Has the director in fact begun already? Was this a second-unit crew picking up some pre-production shots without proper documentation? And what will Brad Pitt's role be in the case? Or is this perhaps not related to Winterbottom's film at all? There is another Daniel Pearl movie, you know.

It's been a wild couple of days for Angelina Jolie, as the new mom has signed on to play two drastically different roles. The first, of course, is as a martial arts master named Tigress in the animated film Kung Fu Panda starring opposite Jack Black. However, Variety reports Jolie is also now attached to play Mariane Pearl, wife of slain journalist Daniel Pearl, in A Mighty Heart.

The film, which is an adaptation of Pearl's memoir, will recall the events surrounding the kidnapping and eventual murder of her husband by Pakistani militants. While the book was originally set up at Warner Brothers through Brad Pitt's Plan B, the project has since moved over to Paramount after Plan B relocated there. Stepping behind the camera with his first film for a U.S. studio will be Michael Winterbottom, who is somewhat familiar with the Middle East after previously shooting two films there (The Road to Guantanamo and In this World). Jolie and Winterbottom? Nah, this one won't have a ton of political undertones. Eager to get the ball rolling immediately, production on A Mighty Heart will begin within the next five weeks off a script written by Laurence Coriat and Winterbottom.