New Rose Hotel (film)

Plot summary

Fox (Walken) and X (Dafoe) are corporate extraction specialists, half headhunters, half kidnappers, who specialise in helping R&D scientists relocate from corporations who would rather see them dead than working for their competitors. Fox is obsessed with one Hiroshi (played by Final Fantasy artist Yoshitaka Amano), a paradigm-shattering super-genius who is currently working for Maas, the corporation (Gibson employs the pre-World War II term zaibatsu) who crippled him. To that end, Fox and X employ Sandii (Argento), a "Shinjuku-girl", or small-time hustler/call girl, to help "persuade" Hiroshi to defect to Hosaka, another zaibatsu to which Fox is somewhat warmer. Fox is responsible for brokering the deal with Hosaka, Sandii for getting Hiroshi to fall in love with her and defect to a Hosaka lab in Marrakech (Fox and X are based in Tokyo, hence their ability to pick up a Shinjuku girl), and X is responsible for teaching Sandii how to make Hiroshi melt. Sandii disappears, Fox is killed, and X retreats to the safest place he knows, the New Rose Hotel, a derelict capsule hotel.

Cast

Production

Edward R. Pressman had owned the film rights to New Rose Hotel since the late 1980s. Before Abel Ferrara got involved, Kathryn Bigelow was originally set to direct.

At one point, Zoë Tamerlis Lund was attached to writing the screenplay. In 1996, Lund wrote the first draft of the script.

According to Ferrara, both Virginie Ledoyen and Chloë Sevigny were considered for the role of Sandii. Ferrara also claims that Arnold Schwarzenegger was considered for the role of Fox.

Asia Argento made a documentary about Ferrara, titled Abel/Asia (1998), during the making of the film.

Ferrara admitted in an interview that he fired a lot of the crew members of the film; some of them were longtime collaborators of Ferrara's, such as film composer Joe Delia.