Nine Queens

Nine Queens (2000)

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If you think you've got it figured out... you've been conned.

Two con artists try to swindle a stamp collector by selling him a sheet of counterfeit rare stamps, the "nine queens".

Date of release
2000-08-31
TMDB
7.8 / 10 (872)
Runtime
1h 54m
Genres
Crime, Thriller, Drama
Director
Fabián Bielinsky

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Box office: $12.4M
  • Filmed in: Buenos Aires

Nine Queens is a 2000 Argentine heist crime drama film written and directed by Fabián Bielinsky. It stars Ricardo Darín and Gastón Pauls as con artists Marcos and Juan, who team up to sell a block of counterfeit rare stamps to a wealthy foreign collector.

Production

Writer-director Fabián Bielinsky finished the screenplay for the film in 1997, which he wrote in less than sixty days. He based the script on real scams that happened to his family members and books about scams, and aimed for it to have an objective point of view in order to maintain the logic of the film itself. The script was initially titled Farsantes (transl.

He unsuccessfully tried to sell the script for over a year. According to Bielinsky, "producers didn't like it" as the Argentine film industry "isn't very fond of genre films." In 1998, he submitted the script for a contest organised by production company Patagonik Films —one of the companies that rejected the idea— and was awarded first place out of 260 scripts submitted.

Marcelo Camorino joined the project as director of photography in February 2000. The film would originally star Leonardo Sbaraglia as Juan and Gabriel Goity as Marcos. Sbaraglia had read the script a year and a half before it was produced and was already committed to filming Intacto (2001) by the time Nine Queens was to begin production. He left the project a month before filming began.

Before filming was scheduled to begin, Bielinsky shot scenes for a week with Pauls, Darín, and a reduced crew as a "warm-up". They then had another week of pre-production before filming. Filming lasted for seven weeks. A steadicam was used for over 30 days, which was expensive for the limited budget available. The film was shot entirely on location, using 35mm film.

Marcelo Salvioli, the film's art director, initially expressed concern for the hotel scenes included in the script, as it would be difficult to find a location that would fit the requirements and that would allow them to use it. The hotel should "not have any nobility, it had to be a new American chain, a place where cheating prevailed". The Hilton Hotel in the neighbourhood of Puerto Madero was coincidentally being built.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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