Monday, February 28 2000
Upcoming.movies.com tells that "Quills" will probably released in November this year (they did add: ... which positions it nicely for the
awards season!!)

Monday, February 21 2000
From Feburary 2000, Movieline "Sympathy for de sade"
Aided and abetted by Geoffrey Rush and Kate Winslet, the director of Henry & June and The Unbearable Lightness of Being is taking on the infamous nexpoits of the sex-obsessed Marquis de Sade in Quills, a film that's likely to prove one of 2000's more daring big-screen experiences.

Can you see straight down my top? Kate Winslet asks Geoffrey Rush as she kneels outside the door to his cell and he peers out the small peephole into her cleavage. She and Rush are on a London soundstage reherasing a scene from Quills, director Philip Kaufman's movie about the Marquis de Sade, and both actors are in a rambunctious mood. "I have to be careful with Geoffrey because he's such a giggle," Winslet confides. "I'm not usually this high-spirited, but he brigns something out in me." Winslet plays a young laundress in the Charenton asylum in France where the Marquis has been confined in the years after the French Revolution; he has enlisted her to smuggle eagerly awaits his latest chronicles of unspeakable perversions. Ameridcan audience have never shown wild enthusiasm for kinky subjects, and among American directors, Philip Kaufman is rare in evincing curissity about the darker secrets of sexuality. Kaufman helped launch the NC-17 rating with Henry and June a decade ago, and he has shown a flair for eroticism in many of his movies, including 1988's The Unbearable Lightnessof Being. Quills is his first film in more than six years. During part of the interim he toiled on another sexually audacious project, the adaptation of Caleb Carr's novel The Alienist, which remains stuck in development hell-no doubt in part because the subject of male child prostitution is a controversial one for any studio to tackle.

An impressive group of actors seems ready to fly in the face of public squeamishness with Kaufman on Quills. In addition to Rush as the Marquis, and Winslet as the laundress Madeleine, there is Michael Caine as a doctor who institutes his own tortures to quell the libidinous rantings of the Marquis, and Joaquin Phoenix as a priest who champions more humane methods of treating the miscreants in his care and harbors a secret lust for Madeleine.

Kaufman notes gratefully that none of the actors balked at the script's provocations. He is a particular fan of Winslet's. "Kate just glows," he says. "She's outspoken, uninhibited, totally enthralled with acting." In a way, Winslet's character is the heart of the film-a young, innocent woman who is stimulated rather than repelled by the Marquis's salacious fantasies. "I know some people describe Sade as a misogynist," Kaufman says, "but many woman have embraced his writing. Simone de Beauvoir was one of the first people to discuss him seriously. Angela Carter wrote a provocative book about him. Camille Paglia champions him." In the film, Madeleine is the Marquis's greatest enthusiast. "This laundy lass loves his writings because he provides entertainment in a rather dark, drab world," Kaufman says. "I try to look for beauty and humor in everything I do, and I think there is a lot of beauty in this mental asylum. Any time people try to keep their spirits up in a grim situation, there is beauty. Madeleine is open to experience, even in the most horrific of places. That's why Kate is the ideal actress to play the part. She's completely game for everything." Quills did not originate with Kaufman but with screenwriter Doug Wright, who first created it as an off-Broadway play in 1995. The subject appealed to Wright because of the political battles raging in the '90s over controversial art. "I decided to appropriate Sade to write a parable about our culture," he says. "I wanted to write a freedom of speech polemic using the worst possible case history." In the movies, Napoleon Bonaparte is the early 19th century analogue to New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani or Senator Jesse Helms-the commissar crusading to suppress pornography. When the Marquis's quills and manuscripts are confiscated, he use a chicken bone and a carafe of wine to cover his bedsheets with erotic stories. And when he loses those, he uses his own blood to continue writing the tales that obsess him. Wright admits that his interest in Sade was not purely intellectual. "I find his writings sexy, because he dealt with human appetite ungilded. I think we all want to be infants again, reveling in our own bodily functions, having all our hungers sated . That's why Sade is both repellent and alluring. Some of his writing soars, andsome of it is adolescent portography. Still, it touches a nerve. I thought I was pretty jaded, but Sade's work is more shocking than anything in contemporary culture." The sets at Pinewood Studios outside London where Kaufman is working with Winslet and Rush are adorned with a riot of outre sexual paraphernalia, all part of the production design by Martin Childs, who won an Oscar for his last period re-creation,Shakespeare in Love. The Marquis's cell is packed with weird erotic sculptures and antique dildos; his walls are lined with explicit sexual drawings, and his shelves contain oddities like female body parts soaked in formaldehyde. Much of the detail many register only subliminally, but it all contributes to the amibience of rank, unfettered sexual obsession. How shocking will the movie be? "I did not feel the compulsion to create visually what Sade did in his stories," Kaufman says. "I was not lookingfor sexually horrific images. "This was not meant to be Pasolini's Salo [a graphic cinematic adaptation of Sade's fiction from 1975]."

Kaufman even hopes that his movie will get an R rating.
He notes bitterly that despite the publicity surrounding Henry & June, the NC-17 rating never became the label for seriousminded erotic films; it quickly became the exact equivalent of the old X rating that it was meant to replace, and today all directors, even when they are workingfor art-house companies like the one making Quills, Fox Searchlight, are required by contact to deliver an R-rated film. This movie is not meant to fly in the face of the MAPP," Kaufman says. "But I suppose there are things in it that will be shocking."

One such episode is a tryst between Winslet and Phoenix that is tinged with necrophiliac overtones. Whether that scene will make it intact to your local cineplex remains to be seen, but Kaufman's film is likely to challenge audiences by delving more deeply into the mystery of sexuality than most movies do. "The exploration of sex, which is on everyone's mind, seems to me more important than the exploration of murder, which is not on everyone's mind," says the director. "The more we can understand sexuality, the better we'll be as people."

Saturday, February 19 2000
A review of a "Gladiator Screening" - it contains SPOILERS and is rated average. If you don't mind spoilers, click here.

Sunday, February 13 2000
Another award-fact: Joaquin was nominated at "The Csapnivalo Awards" which took place in January 2000. The goal of this Award is to honor the best movies shown in Hungary in the previous year. And Joaquin got nominated for "Best male performance" for "Return to Paradise". The other nominees were Christian Slater and Mike Myers.
Anyway, Joaquin didn`t win.Christian Slater won for his performance in "Very Bad Things" (love that movie!)

Saturday, February 12 2000
In 1985 Joaquin got nominated at the "Young Artist Award" in the category Best Young Actor in a Family Film Made for Television for the movie "Backwards: The Riddle of Dyslexia" along with his brother River.
Interesting fact.The Internet-movie-data-base just added that movie. Joaquin and River are listed as the only actors. Besides the award-nominatons, there is no more info about the movie.

Saturday, February 5 2000
Dark Horizons postet some pics of "Quills". One shows Joaquin with Kate Winslet, they others show Michael Caine and Geoffrey Rush.
"Kate Winslet, Joaquin Phoenix, Geoffrey Rush and Michael Caine all star in this drama set in a French asylum where an imprisoned Marquis De Sade (Rush) continues writing his sexually explicit literature which is smuggled to the outside via the young maid Madeline (Winslet). Both De Sade and the priest (Phoenix) who was sent to rehabilitate him secretly desire the feisty young woman and it soon becomes a battle of wills between the three. The movie is currently in production and will be out later his year."

If you can`t wait to see more or "Gladiator" you should visit one of these sites: Countdown to Gladiator  Maximum Russell Crowe Gladiator Page  DreamWorks SKG Fansite's Gladiator Page