And then, afterwards, I was taken away to another place, to another film where I had just replaced the director, and I didn’t have a very good start. I didn’t know what it really meant to tell a story. It was a very easy step away from getting into directing, but I didn’t know the responsibilities of the director.
Seriously, we went to Toronto, and I went into my room and there was a check waiting for me from a guy that interned with me for three months.
ICEMAN KILLER INTERVIEW MOVIE
And then, I was very lucky on my first movie because, believe it or not, my assistant ended up financing it. I was not interested in being a director or producer or writer. Vromen: I was a soldier, and then I was a law student, and then there came a point where I wanted to be more involved in the post-production world of filmmaking. And then, getting Michael Shannon to play this role was a complete triumph for me, because it’s not easy to get financing with only the idea of creating a film. I knew that he would be a great character. I wasn’t necessarily applauding the movement of the structure of the script. I think it was seeing that duality and identifying it as a character base to start a movie. At one point, he took that talent and used it to provide a dream, a fantasy world that he created. In the beginning, it was to defend himself from either the bully in the neighborhood or from anything that he felt was threatening his own security.
ICEMAN KILLER INTERVIEW HOW TO
He didn’t know how to translate the fact that he could do this, because he killed when he was 16 for the first time. He didn’t understand that he was a sociopath. There is a grey area that he’s zoning between, trying to find himself within himself. I identified that there was something about this character that was not just black and white. Question: How did this story come to you and what is it that made you realize this would make a really good film?Īriel Vromen: I saw the documentary and I saw all the materials about him.
He also discussed his next project, Narco, a drug-centric action thriller set in the world of narco-trafficking submarines. Opening on May 3 rd, the film also stars Winona Ryder, Chris Evans, David Schwimmer, Ray Liotta and Robert Davi.Īt the recent press day, Vromen talked about why he thought Kuklinski’s story would make a fascinating film, how he convinced Shannon to shoot a test scene that helped secure the financing, why the ying yang dynamic between Shannon and Ryder worked so well, what led to some of the surprising casting choices for the supporting roles and how he balanced those with veterans of the genre, and why he was inspired by American mob movies while growing up in Israel. A man of many contradictions, Kuklinski was by various accounts a loving husband, a devoted father, and a ruthless hitman who concealed his work from his family. Director Ariel Vromen talks about The Iceman, casting Michael Shannon and Chris Evans, NARCO, and more.ĭirector/co-writer Ariel Vromen’s The Iceman chronicles the life of notorious contract killer Richard Kuklinski ( Michael Shannon) who earned the nickname for freezing the bodies of his victims to throw authorities off his trail.