Also on the superstar front: half-way through January (January 18, to be precise) Bruce Willis began work with director Jon Turtletaub on a untitled comedy about a successful image consultant who meets himself as an eight-year-old child (could it be that Willis is now going to make lots of movies with eight-year-old co-stars?), while Michael Caine teamed up two days earlier with director John Irvin on a gangster thriller called Shiner, which is shooting in London.
The formidable pairing of Jennifer Lopez and Matthew McConaughey started work on The Wedding Planner on January 27, and the much-discussed Sam Raimi film The Gift - about a woman who is abused by her partner and turns to a psychic for help - started filming in Savannah, Georgia (surely one of the most over-used of current locations), with a mouth-watering cast headed by Cate Blanchett, Keanu Reeves, Giovanni Ribisi and Hilary Swank (Oscar-nominated for Boys Don’t Cry).
Possibly the winter’s biggest start, however, was on January 10, when Drew Barrymore, Cameron Diaz and Lucy Liu took their first orders from an unseen controller in Columbia’s big-screen version of Charlie’s Angels. The film’s director, McG, is likely to be an equally unknown figure for most moviegoers.
Among promising young British directors, Michael Winterbottom launched into a genre that has been the nemesis of many of his compatriots when he rolled cameras for the first time on February 7 on his western, Kingdom Come, starring Peter Mullan, Wes Bentley, Nastassja Kinski and Milla Jovovich. But David Kane, whose debut feature This Year’s Love was featured in Preview 40, stuck to safer ground with Born Romantic, shooting in London on the same day with a couple of members of the previous film’s cast (Ian Hart and Catherine McCormack), plus Jane Horrocks from Little Voice and Jimi Mistry from East Is East.
Other non-Brit indie starts included Gary Fleder’s Imposter, produced by Dimension Films, with a gilt-edged cast that includes Gary Sinise, Madeleine Stowe, Vincent D’Onofrio and Tony Shaloub: that rolled on December 14. Parent company Miramax’s Wakin’ up in Reno, starring Billy Bob Thornton, Charlize Theron, Patrick Swayze and Natasha Richardson, started on January 24, with Jordan Brady (director of the as-yet unreleased The Third Wheel, produced by and starring Matt Damon and Ben Affleck) behind the camera.
And Susan Seidelman started production on Gaudi Afternoon, one of the first English-language films for Spanish producer Andrés Vicente Gómez’s Lolafilms, with some pretty heavy-duty female firepower in its cast: Judy Davis, Juliette Lewis, Lili Taylor and Marcia Gay Harden. Given the title, it is not surprising that the film should be shooting in Barcelona.
Jean-Jacques Annaud, meanwhile, started shooting his epic Enemy at the Gates for Mandalay in Berlin on January 17, a week after cult Japanese director Takeshi ‘Beat’ Kitano began Brother, his first English-language film, for producer Jeremy Thomas in Los Angeles.
On the art-house front, veteran radical Karl Francis called action on One of the Hollywood Ten, starring Jeff Goldblum as the blacklisted Herbert Biberman, in Spain on January 31; while French director Patrice Chéreau began work on his first English-language film, Intimacy, starring Mark Rylance, Timothy Spall, Kerry Fox and Marianne Faithfull, in London six days later.
Foreign-language starts during December, January and the first half of February include Raul Ruiz’s Fils de deux mères, starring Isabelle Huppert, Jeanne Balibar and Charles Berling, on December 8; Western director Manuel Poirier’s Te quiero, with Maruschka Detmers and Patrick Chesnais, the following day; veteran iconoclast Jean-Pierre Mocky’s new film, Le glaneur (The Reaper) on December 17; Claire Denis’ Trouble Every Day, with Vincent Gallo and Béatrice Dalle, which started in Paris on January 10; and Israeli director Amos Gitaï’s new film, Kippur, which started on January 15.
Finally, last (and maybe even least), Harold Ramis began his remake of the Peter Cook-Dudley Moore comedy, Bedazzled - a film which, it has to be said, enjoys a much higher reputation on the other side of the Atlantic than it does in the UK - in Los Angeles, with a cast headed by Brendan Fraser and Liz Hurley. The original, should time have erased your memories, was an update of the Faust legend, directed in 1967 by Stanley Donen.