Shakespeare in Space

It was one of those marriages that couldn’t last: Shakespeare and science fiction. But it did give birth to a classic - MGM’s 1956 movie The Forbidden Planet. The story of a spaceship that crash-lands on a planet called Altair IV, ruled by a benevolent despot (Walter Pidgeon) who has a beautiful daughter (Anne Francis), an obedient slave and a creature lurking somewhere, the film was loosely based on The Tempest (for the aforementioned characters, think Prospero, Miranda, Ariel and Caliban). For the record, the captain of the crash-landing ship - the Shakespearian equivalent would be Alonso, King of Naples - was a young Leslie Nielsen.
The Shakespeare bit was not something that fifties moviegoers took much notice of (although the critics, predictably, had a field day). But The Forbidden Planet was pretty much of a high-end movie, not to be confused with the ones starring giant ants, blobs and other such denizens of the sci-fi landscape in the fifties. No, what everyone remembers from The Forbidden Planet is Robbie the Robot, without question the cutest heap of space-junk to hit the screen before R2-D2 trundled along. Robbie went on to do TV shows, public appearances (and, for all I know, open supermarkets) in the fifties, but a remake has been a long time in happening. It’s good to hear, however, that it will be coming from New Line, whose president of production Mike De Luca has been shaping up the mini-major as one of the brightest spots in a cholesterol-heavy Hollywood. De Luca and fellow New Line exec Richard Saperstein claim to have been fans of The Forbidden Planet since childhood (although they must surely have seen the movie on TV), and recently put a big-budget, high-tec remake on the fast track. Once I have a few more details - like who is going to direct, who is going to star and when it’s going to get made - I will be sure to pass them on. Quite apart from anything else, I want to see how modern special effects deal with the Monster from the Id, The Forbidden Planet’s fearsome Caliban, who turns out to have been created by all the bits of his subconscious that the film’s Prospero, Dr Morbius (Pidgeon), has been busy repressing.

Rolling...

Hollywood is back in full swing now, following the longer-than-usual New Millennium break (see our regular ‘Production Calendar’ starting on page 64). The big one - Disney’s Jerry Bruckheimer production, Pearl Harbor, starring Cuba Gooding Jr, Ben Affleck, Alex Baldwin and Colm Feore, got underway in the place where it all started - Hawaii - on April 8, with other locations set to include Los Angeles, San Francisco, Mexico and the UK. And Steven Soderbergh finally gave the green light to Traffic - plans for which were covered at some length on these pages last time out. It went into production for Fox Searchlight and Initial Entertainment, with Mr and soon-to-be Mrs Michael Douglas (Catherine Zeta-Jones, for Martian readers) a couple of days after Pearl Harbor. At Paramount, meanwhile, Nancy Meyers began What Women Want - answer, Mel Gibson - on February 23, the women in question being Helen Hunt, Marisa Tomei and Lauren Holly. And Lee Tamahori started work in Vancouver on thriller Along Came a Spider with Morgan Freeman the following week (February 28) Gus Van Sant began work on Finding Forrester, his first film since the Psycho clone, with Sean Connery, F Murray Abraham and Anna Paquin, in New York and Toronto on April 3. With their current film featured on page 42, meanwhile, the Farrelly brothers started work on the next one, Say It Isn’t So, on March 9. They’re not directing, however: JB Rogers is - he was originally lined up to direct Me, Myself & Irene before Jim Carrey came onboard - with Heather Graham starring. The Farrellys are the producers. Two days later, a pairing I thought I wouldn’t live to see - John Boorman and John Le Carré - became a reality when shooting started on The Tailor of Panama, starring Geoffrey Rush, Pierce Brosnan and Jamie Lee Curtis. The locations, not surprisingly, are Panama and Ireland. Among other European auteurs, Jean-Jacques Beineix started Mortel transfert, his first feature in a decade, with Jean-Hugues Anglade and Miki Manojlovic, on March 18. And the movie expected to put one of the major film-making forces of the seventies, Werner Herzog, back on the map started a couple of days later (March 21). Set in Berlin in the thirties, Invincible stars Finnish weight-lifter Jouka Ahola as a Jewish strongman in Nazi Germany. Also cast are Tim Roth and Udo Kier, with filming due to take place in Lithuania, Germany and the Netherlands. Catherine Breillat, whose Romance was one of last year’s most controversial hits, started her new film, Fat Girl, in Paris on March 23. And German favourite Sönke Wortmann is currently filming an English-language debut, The Hollywood Sign, in LA and Las Vegas with Burt Reynolds, Rod Steiger and Tom Berenger, while Italian auteur Pupi Avati rolled The Knights of the Quest, starring Edward Furlong, James Fox and the obviously very busy F Murray Abraham, in Scotland on April 3. And finally, Venice Golden Lion-winner Milcho Manchevski began work on his long-awaited second feature on April 4. Titles with which Manchevski’s name have been linked since After the Rain won the Venice prize in 1994 have included An Alan Smithee Film, a James Dean biopic, the Dial M for Murder remake which later became A Perfect Murder and cannibal caper Ravenous - which was pronounced “almost certain” a couple of summers ago (the film was eventually made by Antonia Bird). The film Manchevski has now definitively started, meanwhile, is called Dust and stars Joseph Fiennes, David Wenham and Adrian Lester.