Bill Lee
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May 2, 2017. “A paranoid-schizophrenic is a guy who just found out what’s going on.” — William S. Burroughs. The best thing about David Cronenberg’s 1991 adaptation of William S. Burroughs’s...
- Plot
- Production
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In 1953, exterminator William Lee finds that his wife Joan is stealing his supply of insecticide to use as a recreational drug. Lee is arrested by the police, and he begins hallucinating due to being exposed to the insecticide. Lee comes to believe that he is a secret agent, and his boss, a giant talking beetle, assigns him the mission of killing J...
Development
Filmmakers, including Stanley Kubrick and Antony Balch, using a script from Brion Gysin, attempted to adapt William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch into a film, but were unsuccessful. In 1981, Cronenberg was interviewed by Omni during the release of Scanners in the United States and stated that he was interested in making a film based on Burroughs' novel. Producer Jeremy Thomas met Cronenberg at the 1984 Toronto Festival of Festivals and discussed making a film adaption of the novel. Burroughs, Cro...
Filming
Cronenberg intended the film to be shot in Tangiers, but the Gulf War prevented him from filming in North Africa as they could not receive insurance. Cronenberg massively rewrote the script a few days before filming due to being unable to shoot in Tangiers. Cronenberg worked on the film while also starring in Nightbreed.The film was shot on a budget of around US$17 million and shooting started on 21 January 1991 in Toronto. Chris Walaswas hired to perform the special effects for the film. The...
Music
The film score is composed by Cronenberg's staple composer, Howard Shore, and features free jazz musician Ornette Coleman. The music of the Master Musicians of Jajouka led by Bachir Attar is also featured throughout the film. The use of Coleman's composition "Midnight Sunrise", recorded for his Dancing in Your Headalbum, is relevant, as author William S. Burroughs was present during the 1973 recording session.
Box office
Naked Lunch was released on 27 December 1991 in a limited releaseof 5 theaters, grossing $64,491 on its opening weekend. It went on to make $2,641,357 in North America.
Critical reception
On Rotten Tomatoes the film has a 70% rating based on 37 reviews, with an average rating of 7/10. The consensus reads, "Strange, maddening, and at times incomprehensible, Naked Lunch is nonetheless an engrossing experience." On Metacritic, it has a weighted average score of 67 out of 100 based on reviews from 16 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews". Roger Ebert gave the film two-and-a-half stars out of four and wrote, "While I admired it in an abstract way, I felt repelled by the...
Accolades
At the 13th Genie Awards, Naked Lunch received 11 nominations and was perceived as being in an unusually tight competition with Jean-Claude Lauzon's Léolo. The film also competed for the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival.
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Naked Lunch at IMDbNaked Lunch at Box Office MojoNaked Lunch: Burroughs an essay by Gary Indiana at the Criterion CollectionFormer junkie William Lee (Peter Weller, Robocop) makes ends meet as an exterminator. But when he and his wife Joan (Judy Davis, Barton Fink) discover the hallucinatory properties of the powder he...
Blank-faced bug killer Bill Lee (Peter Weller) and his dead-eyed wife, Joan (Judy Davis), like to get high on Bill's pest poisons while lounging with Beat poet pals. After meeting the devilish Dr...
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Apr 9, 2013 · In this adaptation of William S. Burroughs’s hallucinatory, once-thought-unfilmable novel Naked Lunch, directed by David Cronenberg, a part-time exterminator and full-time drug addict named Bill Lee (Peter Weller) plunges into the nightmarish Interzone, a netherworld of sinister cabals and giant talking bugs.
Apr 17, 2023 · Chris Rodley’s excellent making-of documentary Making Naked Lunch gets a new scan, and Rodley also supplies an audio interview about the film. Concept art galleries and image galleries and the film’s theatrical trailer finish off the disc.
Apr 9, 2013 · Naked Lunch, adapted by the dauntless David Cronenberg from William S. Burroughs’s 1959 landmark novel, represents a remarkable meeting of the minds. It’s hard to imagine another filmmaker who could delve so deeply into the monstrousness of Mr. Burroughs’s vision, in the end coming up with a bona fide monster movie of his own.
