Part 2: INT: HOTEL
Always have someone killed in the first scene. That’s my goal, anyway. Originally this opening scene was longer, but something as mundane as page count made me decide to cut it here. More of a cliffhanger that way, too.
The inciting incident is actually borrowed from “Bullit”, just as there are references to “Serpico” and “The French Connection”
The story is sort of a spin-off of “The Devil’s Concubine”. I had a few characters left still standing, and I wanted to explore the problems of the contemporary male. All wrapped in a gritty 70’s style cop story, that looks just as straight-forward as it isn’t.
I saw these two cops during a vacation in Cannes. They were pulling over a car and walking up to the driver in a confident swagger, all sunglasses and tight t-shirts. I was working the script for “Stiletto” over in my head, and decided to use – and off – these two in this first scene. The hotel is called “Interlaken” and is actually found just across from the train station in Nice, France. Just as in “The Devil’s Concubine“, the setting is a non-specific Southern European town, so I tend to use places and people from all over Europe.
Well, not Finland, obviously.
“Stilletto” hits the streets the spring of 2012.