John Curran‘s Stone (Overture, 10.8) is some kind of mind-blower. It really and truly steps outside the box. It serves up moral/spiritual issues and past nightmares and demons and asks you, the viewer, to decide where the real morality and salvation lie.

I spoke to Curran a week or two ago. My audio digicorder was lost at the time so I used my Canon SD1400 camera. In the above clip we talk about Ed Norton, the film’s sexuality, Robert DeNiro, Milla Jovovich, and the challenge facing the Stone marketing team.

There’s a point at which I tell Curran that I’ve turned the camera off, which I really did believe I’d done. I later decided after reviewing it that what Curran said about the selling of Stone was pretty mild stuff, and that we touched on issues that should be heard and discussed, so I left it in. The recording works better with it.

I said in my initial review that Norton’s character “starts out as some kind of scurvy opportunistic convict with a corn-row haircut, but he gradually goes somewhere else. De Niro’s prison counselor seems dull and compromised but half-sympathetic (or at least will eventually seem that way, you’re thinking, once you get to know him) but he, too, goes to an unexpected place. And Jovovich, whom Norton describes early on as a kind of ‘alien’, turns out to be less than that, but is definitely in her own realm.

“And she’s not the character who winds up leaving the planet, so to speak.”