Nine Queens (2000) on Netflix
Caught running a bill-changing scam, Juan is walked out of a store by Marcos, who claims to be a policeman. Marcos offers Juan a day as his partner in a con.
- Netflix3.7/5
- IMDb7.9/1063,806 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes92%
Trailer
Plot summary
Con artist Juan works a bill-changing trick on a cashier at a convenience store, then is caught trying the same trick on another cashier. Marcos, a fellow swindler, poses as a police officer, leads Juan out, and invites him to partner for the day. Juan needs $70,000 to bribe a judge at his father's hearing; his father, a con man, is in jail. Sandler, an elderly former associate of Marcos, asks for help selling a counterfeit sheet of rare stamps, the Nine Queens, to Vidal Gandolfo, a wealthy Spanish collector facing deportation for corruption charges.
Cast
- María Mercedes Villagraas Convenience Store Employee 2
- Carlos Lanarias Man on Cell Phone
- Antonio Ugoas D' Agostino
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Nine Queens (2000)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Nine Queens was originally to star Leonardo Sbaraglia as Juan and Gabriel Goity as Marcos; Sbaraglia, already committed to filming Intacto (2001), left the project a month before filming began, so the studio cast Ricardo Darín in place of Goity.
- Writer-director Fabián Bielinsky finished the screenplay in 1997 in less than sixty days, basing it on real scams that happened to his family members and on books about scams.
- The final warehouse scene was filmed twice: unsatisfied with the first version, Bielinsky reshot it about a week after filming ended, while editing had already begun, and only the shots of Ignasi Abadal's Vidal Gandolfo survived because Abadal had returned to Spain.
- No bank would let the production film inside for the bank scene, so it was shot at a bankrupt former bank on Avenida Corrientes that required a judge's authorization; three lanes were closed and the gathering crowd ended up in the film.
- The hotel where Marcos's sister Valeria works was played by the Hilton in Puerto Madero, which happened to be under construction; producer Pablo Bossi was friends with one of its owners and got the location, and filming was disrupted by noise, guests and unavailable rooms.
- Because the small budget could not pay for all the extras needed, most street scenes were shot with hidden cameras, and a small group of extras surrounded the already-famous actors to keep passers-by from looking at the camera.
- Bielinsky tried to sell the script for over a year with producers disliking it, then in 1998 won first place out of 260 scripts submitted to a contest run by Patagonik Films, one of the companies that had rejected it.
- For the collector Vidal Gandolfo, the studio wanted an Argentine actor who spoke a "perfect Spanish accent", but Fabián Bielinsky refused because he thought that would take audiences out of the film, and Spanish actor Ignasi Abadal was cast instead.
