I have never read Gibson's original story. I can only hope, for his sake, that it was better than this piece of crap. This film amounted to a real life Bowfinger. I began to think part way through the film that the reason that they showed the famous Japanese actor only on video in the movie was because he was unaware he was being filmed. Walkens performance reminded me of a drunken man. The credits at the end of the film included a reference to Beck's beer. Clearly this may explain Walken's condition. He gave the kind of hackneyed over the top performance that I have to come to expect from once fine actors such as Al Pacino(please reference Devil's Advocate or Any Given Sunday). At least I understand Dafoe's motivation for doing the film. Please reference nude love scenes with Asia Argento. Miss Argento clearly became disgusted with the film and fled back to Italy halfway through the picture. This left the director with no option but to bore us nearly to death with an extended replay of those scenes they had already coaxed from the naive but now wiser Miss Argento. She obviously realized that she needed to try and save her career before finishing this celluloid debacle, but little realized they would attempt to finish it without her. This was possibly the biggest waste of 99 cents that I can imagine. No, I'm not talking about what I paid to rent this loser, but rather what they obviously spent to make it. They used the same 10 minutes of footage of that one round building about 11 times in this film. We had the same sunset at least 3 times. And then they reused Miss Argento's footage 15 or 20 times at the end(not that that is necessarily an altogether bad thing)I began to think that they really only shot like 8 scenes for this movie then edited them together repeatedly. Perhaps they just picked up the scraps off the cutting room floor from some other film and edited them together with Walkens incessant and annoying diatribe. Please, Please whatever you do don't rent this film. The suicide rate in this country is already too high. Remember, you have been warned!