The siblings’ refusal to kowtow was brassy given that the pair, both aged around 30 at the time, were barely known in the industry. Both had dropped out of college, and turned to comic-book writing to get by, before an unpromising first foray in Hollywood. They wrote a screenplay for the action-thriller Assassins, which Warner Bros bought to develop into the critically panned 1995 Richard Donner film of that name, which pitted Sylvester Stallone against Antonio Banderas. Somewhere along the way, it was almost totally rewritten by LA Confidential screenwriter Brian Helgeland. The Wachowskis were so appalled they wanted their names taken off it, but that was contractually forbidden by the studio, leaving them tainted by association.
Their salvation came from Dino De Laurentiis, an executive producer on Assassins, who offered to stump up the $6m budget Bound needed, and to give them a free hand – almost exactly the same deal he had given David Lynch for Blue Velvet (a neo-noir of not dissimilar magnitude) a decade before.
Casting was the sticking point, because most actresses in Hollywood were wary of the lesbian content. The Terminator star Linda Hamilton was offered the Violet role but turned it down, while Tilly, who now admits she was “trepidatious” about the whole thing, was auditioning for Corky. It was a fairly key moment in her career, following an Oscar nomination a year earlier for another moll role, in Woody Allen’s Bullets Over Broadway (1994).
Then in bounded Gershon, who had just finished shooting Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls (1995) and was insistent to her management that that film was about to become a laughing stock. She needed a role, fast, in something well-written that could let her shine, and picked Bound. Her agents were unimpressed, as she told Entertainment Weekly in 2019: “I was told, ‘You are ruining your career doing this movie. We will not let you do this movie.’ I left my agents over it.”
Tilly realised straight away that Gershon would make a better Corky, and found herself identifying more with Violet, a role she now calls her favourite ever. Pantoliano has said the same about Caesar, for which he was put forward by his friend Gershon. He was encouraged to watch John Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1949) and study Humphrey Bogart, to think about a man panicking as everything slips through his fingers.
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