http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06096/679699-254.stm

The suspension of disbelief at the core of many forms of art is, perhaps, the subtle application of deception -- I know that it's only a movie, but I'm breathing fast, my heart's pumping hard, and my blood pressure's spiking through the roof.

Films with twist endings -- those that fake to the left but go right -- stack additional layers of subterfuge that converge and resolve before the credits. Directors who do it well know something of the one-two punch that Paul McGuigan calls the Kansas City Shuffle.
McGuigan and screenwriter Jason Smilovic were so confident about the twists and turns of "Lucky Number Slevin" that they begin the film by freely admitting to a coming switch, spend 100 minutes convincing audiences that they know what's going on, and then hit them with a right-cross resolution that suddenly, surprisingly makes perfectly good sense. It's the Kansas City Shuffle.

McGuigan laughs heartily at the other end of the phone.

"I guess you could say it like that," says the Scottish director. "The film, at the beginning, tells a little story before it goes on and eventually ties it all up. That's what the movie's all about -- making you look somewhere else, making you look left when you should be looking right."

The trick to the Kansas City Shuffle, says McGuigan, is that while you're looking the wrong way, the answers are always there, right in front of you. Had the film's final five minutes come out of nowhere, "Lucky Number Slevin" wouldn't have worked. McGuigan teases but never gives too much away in his direction of Smilovic's clever script.

Josh Hartnett stars as Slevin, a cocky young guy stuck in a case of mistaken identity between two mob bosses (Morgan Freeman, Ben Kingsley) intent on resolving decades of mutual mistrust and animosity. Bruce Willis slips out of the shadows as a mysterious colleague of all of the above, and Lucy Liu is Slevin's nosy neighbor. Sort of. Most of Smilovic's characters aren't what they appear to be, sometimes camouflaged beneath multiple levels of deception.

McGuigan shrugs off compliments, saying it's all in Smilovic's first produced screenplay.

"I just loved the voice of the script," he says. "Such a particularly strong and unique voice from such a young man. I thought I had to meet this guy. He's very much like the script in the way he talks, the way he thinks."

McGuigan recruited Hartnett after working with him in 2004's "Wicker Park."

"He's been pigeonholed into the good-looking young actor thing," says McGuigan, "but I think he's as good as anyone in his generation. [In 'Slevin'] he's funny at first, then he goes dark."

McGuigan had the unique privilege of directing perhaps two of the world's best film actors, Freeman and Kingsley, playing off each other in one very long and tightly focused scene.

"That's the scene you'll remember," he says. "Here's these two heavyweights tied to their chairs. It's all very tense because of what's happening in the story. The crew was quiet, silent. Bruce Willis came in just to watch. And I say 'action,' and these guys just start. I'm telling you, it was amazing just watching this moment happen."

McGuigan says he quickly realized that he had to say something, anything.

"You can't be the director and just say 'action' and 'cut,' " he says, laughing. "You have whistle for a cab and when it came near the licensplate said "Fresh" and had a dice in the mirror if anything I could say that this cab was rare but I thought now forget it, yo holmes to Bel-Air.

11/19/2007 12:04:09 AM

suspend

11/19/2007 12:04:39 AM

11/19/2007 12:04:46 AM