matrixrefugee (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
matrixrefugee) wrote2005-07-29 10:20 pm
matrixrefugee) wrote2005-07-29 10:20 pm
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"Smoke of Satan" Notes: Cut scenes
Just been watching the "how they did that" documentary clips on the second disk of the extended edition of "Constantine": I was right about the emblem of St. Benedict being present -- Check out any close shots of the demon hunter's lighter...
As it turns out (which I'd also discovered from reading the production draft of the script, online) the original opening sequence was supposed to be set in Istanbul. I swear one of the script writers -- I'm betting on Frank Cappello -- must be Catholic (or at least, they reeeeally know their history well). What was Istanbul called before the militant Muslims took it over in the 15th century?
Constantinople, of course. For that matter, the Emperor Constantine helped find the True Cross and also the Sacred Lance (the Spear of Destiny, in movie-verse terms), which only adds to the layers of resonance... Part of me wishes the budget had allowed them to film it with that opening sequence intact (it would have made it a more catholic film -- no, that lowercase c is not a typo; I'm using some convoluted word-play here...), but there's probably a DVD of *that* version in the Library of the Dreaming.
Of course, this has me wondering if I should include two chimeraic scenes I had planned to write for "The Smoke of Satan...", but which I never wrote out, for whatever reason. One featured some of the hoity-toityer members of Sankt Maria's Parish almost ganging up on Constantine when they find out he's prowling around their nice clean little church, and he of course tells it like it is: their nice little church is sitting on top of a hellmouth. It's very Francois Mauriac or Flannery O'Connor-esque sort of scene, where the respectable folk wind up acting -- half unwittingly -- as demonic as some real demons (I sometimes wonder what Mauriac or O'Connor would think of either incarnation of John Constantine). The other featured Natalie sort of venting to Constantine about how upset and annoyed and scared she is with all the stuff that's happening to her parish; he listens to her in "Yeah, yeah, I hear yah, I hear yah [Internal: Stop whining...]" sort of way. I'd like to restore these scenes, but I think I'll probably just release them as "Deleted Scenes", attached to the end of the fic, in a seperate chapter of their own.
As it turns out (which I'd also discovered from reading the production draft of the script, online) the original opening sequence was supposed to be set in Istanbul. I swear one of the script writers -- I'm betting on Frank Cappello -- must be Catholic (or at least, they reeeeally know their history well). What was Istanbul called before the militant Muslims took it over in the 15th century?
Constantinople, of course. For that matter, the Emperor Constantine helped find the True Cross and also the Sacred Lance (the Spear of Destiny, in movie-verse terms), which only adds to the layers of resonance... Part of me wishes the budget had allowed them to film it with that opening sequence intact (it would have made it a more catholic film -- no, that lowercase c is not a typo; I'm using some convoluted word-play here...), but there's probably a DVD of *that* version in the Library of the Dreaming.
Of course, this has me wondering if I should include two chimeraic scenes I had planned to write for "The Smoke of Satan...", but which I never wrote out, for whatever reason. One featured some of the hoity-toityer members of Sankt Maria's Parish almost ganging up on Constantine when they find out he's prowling around their nice clean little church, and he of course tells it like it is: their nice little church is sitting on top of a hellmouth. It's very Francois Mauriac or Flannery O'Connor-esque sort of scene, where the respectable folk wind up acting -- half unwittingly -- as demonic as some real demons (I sometimes wonder what Mauriac or O'Connor would think of either incarnation of John Constantine). The other featured Natalie sort of venting to Constantine about how upset and annoyed and scared she is with all the stuff that's happening to her parish; he listens to her in "Yeah, yeah, I hear yah, I hear yah [Internal: Stop whining...]" sort of way. I'd like to restore these scenes, but I think I'll probably just release them as "Deleted Scenes", attached to the end of the fic, in a seperate chapter of their own.