"I relied on my documentary skills, shooting on HD cameras and finding locations with all natural light and having just a skeleton crew," says Burstein about her footage of Barrymore and Long cavorting on the Coney Island beach, eating and drinking in bars, roaming Chinatown. "Different scenarios, and in each place they'd change clothes so it would feel like a different day or time.
"And because they were a real couple, there was a lot for them to draw on - having that kind of intimacy of falling in love.
"And we were able to turn all that footage into what I felt was a very compelling love montage - and a little different from what you normally see."
A restaurant movie about - movies. Fatih Akin's Soul Kitchen, playing at the Ritz at the Bourse, is a buoyant screwball comedy set in a struggling eatery in Hamburg, Germany, whose harried proprietor tries desperately to keep the business afloat.
And although Akin's film is full of shots of a crazy chef and his gorgeous concoctions, it is also, says the Turkish-born German director, a movie that's very much about making movies, not just food.
"It's my film about filmmaking," says Akin, whose weightier work includes Head-On and the Cannes-winning The Edge of Heaven. "I think it's very boring to write or to think about a film about filmmaking. Day for Night by Truffaut, or 8 1/2 by Fellini - they were the best. But I am in the film world, it's a part of me. . . .
"And to own a restaurant is really much like owning a production company. A chef is really much like a director. And customers are really much like audiences, dishes are like films, the waiters and the cooks are like crew. . . . These are elements I could really relate to."
Contact movie critic Steven Rea at 215-854-5629 or srea@phillynews.com. Read his blog, "On Movies Online," at http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/onmovies/
