Theo Van Gogh

I was shocked by his killing a few years ago. It was more shocking as through friend - not just 6 degrees of separation but just two. This friend's ex husband collaborated with him on scripts. I know that his murder had a huge impact on Holland.

There is an interesting feature at the Guardian talking about how his films are now being remade by Hollywood - noteably Interview with Steve Buscemi and Sienna Miller. And how this seems so totally unfair as Van Gogh was desperate to break into Hollywood.

However the interesting part of the article is the description of his low budget filmmaking technique.

'It was out of pure necessity - in other words, lack of money - that Van Gogh developed the method of running three handheld cameras simultaneously. Official bodies were reluctant to fund his often-controversial projects, and the Van Gogh family fortune - their collection of paintings by his great-great-uncle, Vincent - had been given to the state, much to Theo's fury. With his three-camera set-up, in which one focused on each actor and another provided a master shot, Van Gogh could shoot single takes that lasted as long as 20 minutes. These became a vital vehicle for the fast-paced verbal battles that are central to almost all of his films.
"The technique was more a political statement against those who didn't want to fund him," says Emile Fallaux. "But then it became his doctrine."

Now, of course, it goes down well in money-conscious film-making circles. Buscemi's version of Interview was made for a mere $2m (£970,000).
Sienna Miller, for one, was won over by the relatively seamless, filming-in-sequence method, which made the whole project feel more like a stage production, not least because the actors had to know all their lines from the start. "We're shooting 20 pages of dialogue a day," she said during filming. "And we know the whole thing like a play - we're just running it and running it."'

More here