Johnny Suede

Johnny Suede is a 1991 American film the directorial debut of Tom DiCillo, and stars Brad Pitt and Catherine Keener, with early appearances of Samuel L. Jackson and Nick Cave.

Around 1985, while taking acting classes in New York City, DiCillo was impressed with the local punk movement and the resurgence of rockabilly led by acts like Elvis Costello, The Stray Cats and The Clash. Spinning personal experiences into monologues, he created a character whose vulnerability is obscured by a superficial fifties era cool, exaggerated to the point of foolishness. DiCillo first wove what he had into a onehour oneman show, before setting the first draft of the screenplay to paper. Eight months later he had completed the fourth draft. Having received positive feedback from his friend Jim Jarmusch, DiCillo approached German television, ZDF, who gave him eighty thousand dollars. Additional funding came from the National Endowment for the Arts for twentyfive thousand dollars, as well as a Panavision package and help with the script from the Sundance Lab. Around 1988 to 1989, while at the Cannes Film Festival, DiCillo stumbled into a deal with a South African producer wherein he sold worldwide rights to his film for three hundred thousand dollars an arrangement he would later call, A shaky thing but still I felt it was worth the risk so I decided to go ahead with it.Preproduction, early casting and the search for Johnny quickly followed. By August 1989, having not found what they were looking for in New York, DiCillo and his casting director, Marcia Shulman, went to Los Angeles, where Brad Pitt was the second to last guy seen. DiCillo recalls, He didnt have much on his resume. In fact he only had two things hed done a small Canadian TV series and hed just finished shooting what hed listed as his only real film credit something called Thelma and Louise that no one had heard about because it hadnt even been edited yet. Convinced Pitt was Johnny Suede, DiCillo forced the casting on his South African producer, who was shortly thereafter replaced by Ruth Waldburger when the South Africans option expired. The film was ultimately shot in Will

Source: Wikipedia