11-11-08: THE MILD BUNCH

Hanging out in prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" /Bangkok with Van, Assante, Ciro and the gang.

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Bangkok Film Festival brought together a disparate bunch of criminals for its opening night film. The actual movie screening was the Thai fantasy epic ‘Queens of Langasuka’. (It was originally called Queens of Pattani, but the title was changed when the citizens of Pattani, a small island in the South China Sea, rose up and threatened a Tom Yum Goong boycott.)

I was lucky enough to walking the red carpet with my friend Selina Lo, a Bangkok-based actress. Her dress looked like someone had spray-painted her gold from 15 feet away, so I knew no-one was looking at me… It was a great opportunity to talk up our TWC film ‘Shanghai’ (which just wrapped its Bangkok shoot) and for Selina to tell the world about her upcoming superhero flick.

Inside the theatre, I ran into Ciro Orsini, the restaurateur, bon vivant and world class character I first met at Cannes, many moons ago. You only have to see Ciro to know where Miami Steve Van Zandt got his ‘look’ from... Ciro’s Pomodoro chain of restaurants is now a worldwide franchise. When I was last in Beijing, I found myself outside his local branch, and told the friend I was with that I knew the owner. She asked me what he looked like. We went inside to find… wall to wall photos of Ciro himself with various celebrities. He knows everyone, even Steven Seagal!, and I especially appreciate that he was so hospitable when I met him at Cannes, being as I was such a small (but charming) potato (just like now!). Ciro was there in the company of…

Armand Assante, and I remember, back in the day, how my then girlfriend, back in Peterborough, England, had such a crush on him when we watched the movie version of Mickey Spillane’s ‘I, The Jury’. All these years on, he’s still an imposing figure, very much the lion in winter. He had previously been developing projects with a late, dear friend of mine, Jimmy Moy. Jimmy was another incredible character, a burly, tattooed Chicagoan Chinese judo black belt, financial wiz and would be movie mogul. He had formed a company with Steven Seagal, and I brought him in as an associate producer on my film ‘Dragon Squad’. Jimmy sadly passed away before the film was released. Armand and I shared our warm memories of him.

I arranged to meet Armand and Ciro at an Italian restaurant later that evening. (If you can’t trust Ciro Orsini to find good pasta…) Up in the bar area (yes, a premiere with an open bar, the sure fire path to good press reviews…) we encountered Jean-Claude Van Damme holding court. JCVD’s last film was a brilliant satirical mockumentary thriller (yes, folks, a whole new genre!) called ‘JCVD’. It’s the film to watch for people who don’t want to watch Jean-Claude Van Damme films. Jean-Claude I’ve known forever. I think his ups and downs have been well documented (in ‘JCVD’, if nowhere else!), but he’s never been anything but a good friend to me.

We talked about his latest directorial effort, ‘Full Love’, which just wrapped. Actually, his first film as director, ‘The Quest’, was also shot in Thailand, many moons ago. I remember when they were holding auditions for that at Planet Hollywood Hong Kong, back when there was a Planet Hollywood Hong Kong.

Jean-Claude’s ‘Full Love’ producers and his lovely leading lady, Claudia Bassols, were also on hand. Claudia is of Spanish descent, but, a cunning linguist, she tells me she recently mastered the Swedish tongue. For want of anything sensible to say, I mentioned that we just found out that, on my maternal grand-mother’s side, I’m descended from a Swedish sea captain…

We all reconvened after the premiere at Bangkok’s most authentically Italian restaurant, where we were joined by Desmond O’Neill. Desmond I first met when he played a bad guy in ‘Gen-Y Cops’, back in the day. He’s been in Asia ever since, pursuing various ventures. As with myself, there’s really no beginning to his talents… Desmond and another old friend, Reuben Langdon, joined my family at an improv show in LA. (My sister Kate used to perform with them, but as I recall she wasn’t on-stage that night.) We all ended up at an all-night diner. My mother accurately identified Desmond as “a very naughty boy”. Anyway, he was charming as ever, and it was fun to catch up on our various adventures.

Jean-Claude sat next to me, a certain amount of having been consumed, and commenced to give me a beat-by-beat reenactment of the key scenes in ‘Full Love’. The last time a director did this for me, it was Quentin Tarantino and ‘Kill Bill’, and that didn’t turn out too bad…

The Mild Bunch (l-to-r): Ciro, Armand, Bey and JCVD