Introduction
Jonathan Demme, the Academy Award(R)-winning director of The Silence of the Lambs, as well as such films as Melvin and Howard, Something Wild, Philadelphia and Beloved, was ready for a change.  After devoting himself to the discipline of classically structured films for more than a decade, he wanted to return to the more playful and escapist style of some of his earlier films like Something Wild, Married to the Mob, and the first pictures he did with Roger Corman.

He had an idea: what if he could take one of his all-time favorite flicks, Stanley Donen's 1963 romantic thriller Charade, as a jumping-off point for a sometimes faithful, sometimes radically different new version - dramatically reshaping the relationships and personalities of the lead characters, de-emphasizing key elements of the original, amping up other aspects of the story and setting, and frequently taking the original storyline in entirely new directions. Demme's picture would still be set in Paris, but instead of focusing largely on Parisian charm and elegance, his characters would inhabit a different "City of Lights" with its own quirks, sprawl, diversity, sounds, and surprises.  Stylistically, he would depart from the High Style of the original in favor of an approach that was just blossoming in the Paris of the early '60's - the fabled "French New Wave" that gave birth to the films of Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, Agnes Varda, Jacques Demy, Alain Resnais, and many others.

And so - voila!  While paying homage to both Donen and the Nouvelle Vague, Demme invites moviegoers to sit back and take an unconventional, unpredictable and thoroughly cinematic ride with The Truth About Charlie.

The Truth About Charlie stars Thandie Newton as a young woman searching for answers about her husband's murder and a missing fortune, and Mark Wahlberg as the mysterious "helping hand" all too ready to assist her at every turn.

Her name is Regina Lambert (Newton). She meets Joshua Peters (Wahlberg) while vacationing in Martinique with plans to return home and terminate her recent marriage to the enigmatic Charles Lambert (Stephen Dillane). Life with the charming Charles started out with tremendous excitement and promise, but things have gone quickly and dismayingly downhill.

But upon her return to Paris, they get much worse...

Reggie no longer needs the divorce. Charles has been murdered. Their apartment and bank account have been completely emptied. She is totally freaked. A trio of Charles' former (and very ominous) cohorts, Il-Sang Lee (Joong-Hoon Park), Emil Zadapec (Ted Levine), and Lola Jansco (Lisa Gay Hamilton), are menacing her in hopes of recovering a bundle of missing cash.  As chance would have it, Joshua is in Paris now, too, anxious to help.

Regina could use the assistance, because the more she learns, the more she needs to discover to fill in the missing pieces of this puzzle and to protect herself from the escalating danger.  In the midst of all the chaos, Joshua reveals a growing affection for Reggie, even as disturbing allegations about him surface and undermine her trust.

Hard-edged Paris Police Commandant Dominique (Christine Boisson) considers Regina herself a likely suspect in Charlie's death.  The attentions of a by-the-book American embassy official (Tim Robbins) make her situation even more complicated.  But as the pressure on her increases, Reggie's struggle to extricate herself from the web of deceit and intrigue surrounding Charlie's murder transforms into a belief that, in fact, she must learn the truth about Charlie - and herself - in order to move forward with her life (if she survives the search!).  As the truth about Charlie finally emerges, the truth about the smitten Joshua likewise comes into startling focus.

Universal Pictures presents The Truth About Charlie, a "mystery/thriller with an active sense of humor," to quote director Demme, and starring Mark Wahlberg (Boogie Nights, Three Kings), Thandie Newton (Jefferson in Paris, Mission: Impossible 2, Beloved, Bertolucci's Besieged) and Tim Robbins (The Shawshank Redemption).

The Truth About Charlie also features a glittering international cast including Joong-Hoon Park (Sundance 2000 surprise hit Nowhere to Hide, Two Cops, Say Yes), Ted Levine (The Silence of the Lambs, The Fast and the Furious), Lisa Gay Hamilton (Beloved, True Crime, television's The Practice), Christine Boisson (Antonioni's Identification of a Woman, Un Amour de Trop), Stephen Dillane (The Hours, Spy Game, Welcome to Sarajevo), Frederique Meininger (Annaud's The Lover, Tavernier's 'Round Midnight), Magali Noel (Rififi, many Fellini films), Simon Abkarian (When The Cat's Away, The Man Who Cried), Sakina Jaffrey (Cotton Mary, The Perfect Murder, The Mystic Masseur) and seminal New Wave director Agnes Varda in a cameo role.  Special musical appearances are made by the legendary Charles Aznavour and Anna Karina, as well as by Pierre Carre and Gallic rappers Saian Supa Crew.

Based on Peter Stone's screenplay for the motion picture Charade, The Truth About Charlie was written by Demme & Steve Schmidt and Peter Joshua and Jessica Bendinger. Demme produced the picture with Ed Saxon (The Silence of the Lambs, Adaptation) and Peter Saraf (Ulee's Gold, Adaptation).  Ilona Herzberg is executive producer; Neda Armian and Mishka Cheyko are the co-producers.

Demme's behind-the-camera team includes director of photography Tak Fujimoto (Signs, The Silence of the Lambs), production designer Hugo Luczyc-Wyhowski (My Beautiful Launderette, Madeline, Snatch), Academy Award(R)-nominated editor Carol Littleton (Beloved, E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial), Academy Award(R)-winning composer Rachel Portman (Emma, Beloved) and costume designer Catherine Leterrier (The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc, Gorillas in the Mist).

Nouvelle Vague...Always in
With The Truth About Charlie, his 16th feature film, director Jonathan Demme offers a new take on Stanley Donen's 1963 film, Charade.

"Charade was a huge hit that has pretty much become an enduring classic," said Demme, who also co-wrote and produced The Truth About Charlie. "It's a terrific story with rich characters and settings. I love the way it combines mystery and suspense with relationships and humor.  I asked Stanley Donen how he would feel about Charade being remade and I was thrilled when he gave me his blessing.

"Charade was made in 1963 and depicted Paris in appropriately charming, stylish, elegant terms," Demme continued.  "When approaching the remake, I was excited by the fact that at the same time as Stanley Donen was filming Charade in Paris, the New Wave directors were blasting out their shoot-from-the-hip pictures like A Woman Is a Woman (Godard), Shoot the Piano Player (Truffaut), Cleo from 5 to 7 (Varda), The Cousins (Chabrol), and Lola (Jacques Demy) right around the corner.  So The Truth About Charlie provided a chance for us to play with the notion of a kind of latter-day New Wave spinoff on Donen's high style."

The films of the French New Wave proved a seminal force in the history of modern cinema, and have always exerted a special hold on Demme.

"The first New Wave movie I ever saw was Francois Truffaut's Shoot the Piano Player with Charles Aznavour," Demme recalled. "There's a moment in the film when one of the characters confesses something to someone, and adds, 'And if I'm lying, may my mother drop dead.' And the movie cuts to an old woman clutching her chest and keeling over backwards! That was one of the most exciting moments I ever had in a movie theater. I didn't know movies could do that kind of thing!

"So it was really exciting to consider a new version of Charade from a New Wave visual perspective," he continued. "Today the New Wave is as influential as ever - and probably always will be. So many new films all over the world, as diverse as those of Wong Kar-wai, Lars von Trier, Quentin Tarantino, Paul Thomas Anderson, to name just a few, are directly influenced by those of the original New Wave auteurs."

Demme also observed their influence in Tom Tykwer's bold 1999 hit Run, Lola, Run.

"I loved the way Lola gave flashes of what was going on inside people's minds. I thought 'Hey! The Truth About Charlie could have a subliminal dimension that would be a lot of fun, as it was in Lola. In fact, we named Lisa Gay's character 'Lola' as a salute to that picture!"

Using new technology also appealed to Demme. "We decided to play around with the look by shooting the subliminal material digitally so it would have a different look, a totally different feel from the rest of the picture."

Finally, Demme settled on the overall approach that was in keeping with his various sources of inspiration.  "The idea for us all was to try and shoot the kind of movie we would have liked to do fresh out of film school. It seemed like a fun approach for the style of movie we wanted to make, and it brought a real kind of excitement to the process."

Editor Carol Littleton, a frequent Demme collaborator, agreed.  "Not that any of us had attended film school!" she laughed. "But the idea was to free ourselves from the normal way of shooting a movie. Jonathan's last three or four films had been pretty highly structured and formal in their presentation. Now we had an opportunity to get away from that."

Character References
A brand new approach to the characters of Reggie and Joshua Peters - the couple at the center of the story - was key to the reimagining of the new Charade.  "I wasn't interested in trying to duplicate the cosmic iconic pairing of Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant in any way," Demme emphasized.  "First and foremost, it simply couldn't be achieved today, and second, trying for that kind of duplication wouldn't interest me as a filmmaker anyway.

"At the center of the story are these two characters - a woman in jeopardy, and a guy too ddamned helpful to even hope for.  They are quickly surrounded in the story by an array of characters bent on getting from Reggie things she claims to know nothing about," he continued.

In the original Charade, Audrey Hepburn falls quickly and hopelessly in love with the super-elegant silver fox of all-time... 60-year-old Cary Grant (whose running gag is that Reggie's aggressively amorous advances pose a coronary risk to a guy his age).

The equation is flipped in The Truth About Charlie - character-wise and heartstrings-wisee - with a cool, edgy, and street-smart Mark Wahlberg being the one to this time tumble quickly for Reggie's irresistible blend of warmth, naivete, and... gumption (as Tim Robbins' "Mr. Bartholomew" refers to her).

Instead of romantic sparks instantaneously flying, Reggie and Joshua enter into a bumpy relationship under decidedly fraught circumstances that mixes natural attraction with an escalating sense of possible deception, finally leading to out-and-out alienation with a dwindling hope for redemption.  Joshua seems to be burdened by a serious case of "multiple personality deficit syndrome," which makes romancing Reggie progressively more difficult, to say the least.

The actress Demme envisioned as Reggie was actually a key motivation for making The Truth About Charlie in the first place.  Thandie Newton had played a major role in Beloved, Demme's most recent film, and the director counts himself among her greatest fans. "I was really keyed to making another movie with Thandie," he said.  "She's truly a great young actress: charming, deep, incredibly smart, funny, so totally classy, and ready to try anything as an artist, really fearless, and equipped with a remarkably imaginative point of view on character and story.

"Reggie at her core is an uncorrupted person, a woman of real integrity and decency, with a strong sense of right and wrong," he continued.  "When I saw Charade again, I immediately felt that here was a superb vehicle for this exceptionally gifted and thus-far underutilized actress."

Newton was thrilled.  "There's nothing nicer than going into a film working with your family and, let's face it, Jonathan is my family after Beloved," she said. "He has a huge respect for the people he joins with to make a movie, and the people he collaborates with are so exceptional. His confidence allows you to deliver your very best work."

Newton also savored portraying a character she so admired.  "Reggie's naive and idealistic, but she has a very strong moral standing," the actress observed. "Despite the fact that the most bizarre and unbelievable things are happening to her, she logically and truthfully tries to work them through and solve the dilemma."

The nature of collaboration on the set was liberating for the actress.  "It's almost like the dream life of Jonathan; that's why it feels to me like such an original film.  We were able to invent things as we went along. People on the street were included and sometimes didn't even know it. It gave a freshness and immediacy to shooting that was really exciting."

Demme had not worked with Mark Wahlberg before, but had been very impressed by Wahlberg's performance in Boogie Nights.  Then, after seeing the young actor's work in Three Kings, Demme was confident the actor would bring something special to the character of Joshua Peters.  "I told him to forget Cary Grant.  I considered having that tattooed on my forehead, because we would be going 180 degrees from there. I referred to Mark as the 'anti-Cary Grant.' Instead of this older, dapper, elegant, urbane guy, we were going for a young guy - street-smart, edgy, self-made - a Boy Scout on the surface who mightt just harbor a Heart of Darkness on the inside. A guy who is falling head over heels for a dream girl that he can't seem to be straight with, for reasons known only to him."

Wahlberg was ready. "Joshua is definitely the most challenging role I've played to date. So much is going on in his attempt to solve the mystery and in his attempt to win Reggie. Throughout the story, he's constantly switching gears and reinventing himself to stay in the game as the plot thickens."

Demme's working methods sometimes surprised the actor.  "Jonathan did an incredible job keeping everything fresh for all of us," Wahlberg explained.  "I mean there are characters who appear in almost every scene but Jonathan wouldn't tell me who they were - if they were with me or against me.&  People are going to be surprised."

Demme cast Tim Robbins as Mr. Bartholomew, whose analogue was played by Walter Matthau in Charade.  Even as Demme urged his actors to avoid referencing the earlier film for their characterizations, Tim Robbins was something of an exception.  "I think he had a slight eye on Walter Matthau," Demme allowed.  "I love the sense of humor, the levels, Tim brings to Bartholomew.  It was a little disquieting for me at first to start 'directing' a director whose films I admire so much.  But the sheer fun and excitement of watching Tim Bartholomew-ize himself dispelled my nerves pretty quickly."

Robbins enjoyed taking on the mantle of the inscrutable bureaucrat. "Bartholomew is very straight, conservative, by-the-numbers - or so it seems," he said. "I liked pplaying someone who is so calculating."

Demme cast each role as if it were a lead, beginning with the all-important Commandant, the Parisian police inspector who questions Reggie about Charlie's death.  Unlike the character in the original, the Commandant is a woman in The Truth About Charlie, portrayed by the eminent stage and screen French actress Christine Boisson, who amongst her many other credits has starred in recent Paris stage productions of two plays written and directed by Harold Pinter. "The first time I read the script, the Commandant was a man," said Boisson. "The character is a little like Bogart, tough, strong but especially because she's a woman, very human.  She feels empathy."

The Truth About Charlie represents the English-language debut of Joong-Hoon Park ("Il-Sang Lee"), an enormously popular comedian and film star in his native South Korea and throughout the rest of Asia.  Nowhere to Hide, directed by Myung-se Lee, was a surprise hit at the Sundance 2000 Film Festival.  Starring Park as the crafty, tireless, and hard-pressed "Detective Woo," the film went on last year to a well-received release in the United States and Europe.

Lisa Gay Hamilton ("Lola Jansco") earned her theatre degree from New York University and followed it up with a master's degree from Juillard.  In 1993, she appeared at the New York Shakespearean Festival playing Isabella opposite Kevin Kline in Measure for Measure.  Krush Groove (1985) was her first feature film, which has been followed by roles in 22 television productions and movies, including The Sum of All Fears, True Crime, Twelve Monkeys, Jackie Brown, and, with director Demme, the key role of "Young Sethe" in 1998's Beloved. Hamilton has been a regular on David E. Kelley's television series The Practice since its inception over five years ago.  She also continues to act on the stage, and won an Obie Award for her performance in Athol Fugard's Valley Song in a recent Los Angeles production.  Hamilton is currently directing and co-producing, with Demme, a documentary portrait of the late Beah Richards, whom they worked with and came to adore during the making of Beloved.

Ted Levine ("Emil Zadapec") is widely acknowledged as one of the very finest "character actors" working in America today.  His forty-something appearances on film and television include memorable roles in Wild Wild West, Heat, Georgia, Ironweed, The Fast and the Furious, and previously with Demme as "Buffalo Bill/Jame Gumb" in The Silence of the Lambs. Demme was thrilled at the chance to reteam with Levine for the role of the sly and decidedly hypochondriacal mercenary Zadapec in The Truth About Charlie.

For the mysterious Charlie, Demme signed Tony Award(R)-winning British actor Stephen Dillane, who also appears this fall in The Hours. Consistent with the project's love affair with the New Wave, the film is blessed with special appearances by Nouvelle Vague icons Anna Karina, Agnes Varda, Charles Aznavour and Magali Noel.

Widely considered the female personification of the Nouvelle Vague, Anna Karina starred in seven Jean Luc Godard films including A Woman Is A Woman, Band of Outsiders and My Life to Live. Her extended filmography reads like a "Best of the French New Wave."

The films of Agnes Varda, now in her sixth decade as a filmmaker, include Cleo From 5 to 7, Vagabond, and One Sings, the Other Doesn't. The wife of the late, great director Jacques Demy (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg), Varda won global acclaim last year for her groundbreaking digital documentary, The Gleaners and I.

Charles Aznavour, considered a French national treasure the world over for his unparalleled career in music and films, starred in Shoot the Piano Player as Charlie, the pianist with a tragic secret.  Shoot the Piano Player was the film that hooked Demme on a lifelong love of French cinema. Aznavour is currently starring in Atom Egoyan's Ararat.

The Truth About Charlie's "Mysterious Woman in Black" is Magali Noel, whose credits include Fellini's La Dolce Vita, Satyricon, and Amarcord; as well as Jules Dassin's Rififi and countless other French and European films of the past several decades.

Noel read first for the role of Charlie's vengeful mother, Madame Du Lac, a role that was eventually cast with Frederique Meininger.  "There was no way on earth that the luminous Magali Noel could play such an operatically tragic character," Demme said, "But after meeting this magical actress I was desperate to have her in Charlie.  Magali agreed to a special role we created for her, the 'Mysterious Woman in Black' who mirrors and illuminates Reggie's intense emotional journey at two key points in the picture."

French stage actor Simon Abkarian was cast as the Commandant's inscrutable sidekick, another role Demme conceived after meeting the actor, who had been recommended by Tim Robbins.  "I was so taken by his presence that we invented a part for him on the spot," the director said. "There wouldn't be much dialogue, but Simon said, 'You know, Jonathan, there are many ways to communicate besides words.'"

That Je Na Sais Quoi...
Very early on, Demme recognized another reason he was so passionate about the projectthe city of Paris, and the role it has played in films for so many years.

"Paris still possesses all its old-school beauty and grandeur, but a whole new, global character has emerged in recent years that offers a lot of unused visual possibilities," he explained. 

Demme and his crew pushed Paris from a sophisticated backdrop for the story into a key character in the film, with a tense, dangerous allure that heightens both the suspense and the romance.  "We were gluttons for Paris, and the Parisian population," the director said. "We shot all over the place, day and night. We were trying to devour Paris!"

"We wanted to make the city feel mysterious and scary," added cinematographer Tak Fujimoto. "We wanted it overcast and gray-different from the traditional view of Paris, more realistic, more paranoid."

Production discovered that the rules for filming in France could be helpful. Demme offered a telling example: "There's a rule that as long as the camera isn't mounted, you can shoot wherever you like without a permit."

Great news for Demme, who emulated the hand-held camera work of New Wave filmmakers while shooting.  "We did every shot with an un-mounted camera," he explained. "We never attached the camera to a tripod or a dolly, and where there's a shot that isn't moving, the camera is resting on top of a deflated soccer ball or something.  No real grounding allowed - the camera is never locked down. That excited us. It became a challenging discipline, especially for Pierre Morel, our awesome young camera operator."

Fujimoto loved it.  "Sometimes we would just pick up the camera and start shooting whatever was going on - faces in the crowd, spontaneous events on the streets, even the rehearsals.  It was very liberating," said the cinematographer. 

They also made the most of seeming limitations. Two key sequences that occur on trains had to be filmed within a strictly enforced amount of time.   "Those scenes were very exciting," Demme recalled.  "We could only have the train cars for a limited time, and for some reason, we were only permitted to shoot while the train was moving away from Paris - so that was another element we had to cope with. But hopefully those restraints helped create a sense of urgency in the sequences."

Sounds of Paris
Demme's eclectic musical taste has always been a hallmark of his films and it roams freer than ever in The Truth About Charlie.

"Paris is the acknowledged epicenter of global music," he said, "and working here gave us a chance to have an especially rich, diverse soundtrack.  The artists in the Francophone world, singers and musicians from French Africa, the French Middle East and the French Caribbean, all come to Paris to record their music.  It's an intrinsic part of the city's character today."

For the scene inside Tango Palace, where all the characters interact, production filmed at a Parisian club called Balajo.  Demme was attracted to the tango because of its sense of sensuality and danger.  Ultimately 80 dancers, including most of the principal actors, participated in the action. 

Demme cast Anna Karina as a Tango Palace singer.  Karina, a New Wave icon who has become a singer of note during the last few years, wrote and performed an original song and was backed up by her own band.  Charles Aznavour also sings "When You Love Me," one of his most recent heart-bending ballads.

Who, What, Where...
Demme's technical crew included two of his most valued collaborators, director of photography Tak Fujimoto, who has shot most of the director's films since starting out together in 1974, and editor Carol Littleton who cut Swimming to Cambodia and Beloved.  He chose Academy Award(R)-winner Rachel Portman (Emma), who wrote the score for Beloved, as his composer.  Joining his team for the first time were production designer Hugo Luczyc-Wyhowski and costumer designer Catherine Leterrier. 

Demme's shooting crew was primarily French.  "It was exciting to work with an all French crew," he said. "Everybody on the crew reads the script, everyone is a cineaste, everyone has an opinion, and it creates an incredible camaraderie on the set that adds to the creative mix, to the sense of immediacy and excitement in filming."

Filming began with scenes inside the French Police Headquarters Interrogation Room, then moved to Avenue Bosquet in the Seventh Arrondissement for interiors of Reggie and Charlie's apartment.  The company's next stop was Place de la Concorde for Reggie's initial encounter with Mr. Bartholomew while riding the Millenium Wheel.

Several scenes inside Reggie's Hotel Langlois bedroom and bathroom were shot on studio sets.  Back on the streets, the unit filmed at the labyrinthine flea market in the city's Clignancourt district, then shot exteriors of Reggie and Charlie's apartment on Rue Greuze in the fashionable 16th Arrondissement.  

The unit shot exteriors in Montmartre and moved afterwards to the Gare du Nord, filming inside the Eurostar train when Reggie tries to flee the city. Scenes were also filmed at Charles de Gaulle Airport, underneath the Arc de Triomphe.  

The Hotel des Croises (Hotel of the Crusades) on Rue St. Lazare provided the exterior, main lobby and stairwells for the film's many important Hotel Langlois scenes.  The movie hotel is named in honor of Henri Langlois, creator of the legendary Cinematheque Francaise, "the church where the original New Wave filmmakers reportedly gathered to worship cinema." After filming, the owners of the Hotel des Croises actually changed the official name to the Hotel Langlois!  The movie company donated the Hotel Langlois marquee constructed by the art department to the Hotel's appreciative - and cinema-loving Ð owners.

Scenes were also filmed on Boulevard St. Germain and on Rue des Rosiers. 

"We wanted the geography of the scenes to be a bit confusing, like the story, like the maze that Reggie's caught in," said production designer Hugo Luczyc-Wyhowski, "and we wanted to show Paris as something other than just a beautiful place. We wanted things to be real but we also wanted a kind of heightened reality. 

"We tried to use locations that were interesting graphically, that contributed to the camera movement.  We shot in a lot of corridors. For the second police investigation we shot in a 19th century corridor in the Gare du Nord and this contrasted to the corridor we shot in underneath the Arc de Triomphe traffic circle in which Reggie is led to the morgue where she has to identify Charlie's body.

"Jonathan's idea was to throw away the rule book and get back to being playful," the production designer said.   

That attitude - mandate, actually - created a sense of freedom on the set that permeated every department.  Editor Carol Littleton, for example, was instructed to abandon the idea of having a proscenium in the coverage. "Jonathan wanted to capture the feeling of being right inside the scene," she explained, "as if the viewer were completely involved. The proscenium would disappear, as it were, and we would be inside the action. 

"He wanted the film to be full of life and to show a view of Paris that hadn't been seen before. I believe that for a long time Jonathan has wanted to make a film in France with the flavor of a film by Godard or Truffaut, and I think he accomplished that with The Truth About Charlie's."

Costume designer Catherine Leterrier worked with Demme and production designer Hugo Luczyc-Wyhowski in creating a vision that mixed props, cars and clothes focused strongly on the sixties, so that in Charlie, when a character hails a cab, it's a classic French car that you can only see today in films of the 50s and 60s. But the cars are arresting visually and add texture to the atmosphere. The costumes were also designed in this way. 

"Reggie's look is naive and simple, but sophisticated," Leterrier said. "Her apartment was robbed during her absence and everything she owns is gone. All she has are the clothes on her back and whatever is in the suitcases she carried back from Martinique - mostly colors that were popular in the sixties, beige and orange, and a white raincoat reminiscent of the one worn by Anna Karina in Godard's A Woman Is A Woman. 

"I knew how much Jonathan was inspired by French Nouvelle Vague, low budget movies by Godard with Karina and Belmondo," Leterrier said. "And I had read somewhere that for Godard's Breathless, which was made so cheaply, Belmondo borrowed a jacket from his father and wore it throughout the film. So we designed a jacket for Mark that looked as if it came from a flea market and was kind of beat up, though, in fact, it was tailor made."