You Kill Me

Behind The Scenes provides the usual mix of soundbites, talking heads and snippets from the movie. It also gives cast and crew the opportunity to say lots of nice things about each other. Bill Pullman is a great guy. Luke Wilson is very low-key. Philip Baker Hall a consummate professional. Dennis Farina a pleasure to work with, etc, etc. Mostly, though, it's all about Sir Ben and Téa. Téa loves Sir Ben ("We're having a gas with this – Gandhi is a gas") and Sir Ben loves Téa ("She's our present-day Katharine Hepburn"). He even manages to say that with a straight face.

The audio commentary doesn't offer much more, which is disappointing considering writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely turned in such a sharp, sassy script – maybe it was asking too much for them to give us more of the same in their off-the-cuff comments. It's not a bad commentary: it's just not a very good one either and when they do come up with something interesting they don't always follow through. They say they started the screenplay in 1997 and the movie wasn't made till 2006. So why did it take so long? Did they have trouble with financing? What kind of false-starts did they have along the way? Are they just really slow writers? They don't say.

They do elaborate on their thinking behind the story. They wanted to make a mob movie but they wanted it to be different. They refer to it as the "B team" – instead of Italians we get the Polish, Irish and Greek gangs. Kingsley's character is strictly second division – a low level hitman for a low level family in a low level town. The message is clear – this is not The Sopranos.

FX supervisor Chris Ervin says there are more than 230 visual effects in the movie, which comes as a bit of a surprise because You Kill Me could never be mistaken for the Bourne Ultimatum – there's no leaping off roofs or choreographed fisticuffs. Most of these effects are so subtle, however, you don't even notice them, like the snow scenes in Buffalo – fake snow, mostly, either shipped in or CGI'd during post-production. CGI has also been used to wash out colours to give the movie a more wintry feel – grass, leaves, the sky are all watered down – and Ervin uses a split screen to show us the "before" and "after". Even Buffalo is fake – the New York scenes were actually shot on location in Winnipeg, Canada. Ervin even relocated San Francisco's Golden Gate bridge and recreated it on a "green screen" on a studio set in Winnipeg.