Monday night was the world premiere of Tony Kaye’s “Detachment” at the Tribeca Film Festival. Our heads are still buzzing from the strange and experimental film — you can check out our review here (but this writer strong disagrees with the take). But, lost in the shuffle of “Detachment” finally reaching audiences is the fact that Kaye has another completed film on the shelf, the 2008-shot thriller, “Black Water Transit” starring Karl Urban, Laurence Fishburne, Brittany Snow, Stephen Dorff and more. The crime drama follows the divergent agendas of criminals, cops and lawyers as they collide over a shipment of illegal firearms and a double homicide. Earl Pike (Urban), a criminal, tries to get his family’s illegal gun collection to a safe haven, while attempting to get his junkie son freed from prison. While ‘Transit’ is involved in a similar situation as David O. Russell’s “Nailed,” being from the same financiers, Kaye seems optimistic about the film seeing a release soon.
“It’s about characters in New Orleans after the flood,” said Kaye. “The movie is not finished yet. And me and David O. Russell and a few other filmmakers, we got caught in a hurricane. The poor company that financed it [Capitol Films], they had big ideas. And for us, the ideas were too big. Unfortunately, they just stretched themselves too thin. But they are gonna [finish it] at some point, and I’m praying that [‘Detachment’] will do well.”
It was just one of many intriguing moments during a typically-bizarre public appearance from Kaye, who wore a long grey beard and seemed more than a tad disheveled. When he was introduced to the audience before the film, he would not speak, instead grabbing a guitar and performing a song he had written, featuring lyrics like, “This is the worst dream and the best nightmare that I ever had.” The song closed with a passage that said, “If I could only see it, I would not fight with you, with you, with you, with you, with you, with you, with you,” as he repeatedly pointed into the stands.
He later explained that the song was “about ego” and how to deal with the “opponent inside.” As the famously-contentious director exclaimed, “If I could only see my opponents, I wouldn’t fight with you, or you, or whomever I was fighting with during the course of the movie!” Mmmm, ok, then.
So, we’re guessing we’ll see “Black Water Transit” probably around the same time we see “Nailed” — which means, don’t hold your breath.