No Woman No Film

Imagine hiring Kiefer Sutherland to play his Dad or Natasha Richardson to play her Mum (who is Vanessa Redgrave, in case you’d forgotten). Except this is even odder: Rohan Marley, son of Lion of Zion Bob, is not an actor - although he’s recently started taking acting lessons. The reason is that he is now front-runner to take the lead role in Warners’ Bob Marley biopic, despite the fact that the closest he has come to acting is playing defence for the University of Miami Hurricanes.

Stranger still, there are plans for Marley Jr’s wife - who is much better known than he is, being singer Lauryn Hill - to play Marley Sr’s wife (and, if you’re still following me, her husband’s own mother), Rita. Hill has acted before - she was in Sister Act 2, but you probably don’t remember - and has been talked of in these columns as a possible co-star for Will Smith in the Star Is Born remake, not to mention a big-screen member of Charley’s Angels.

Of course, all plans are contingent on someone coming up with a workable screenplay, the first two contenders having already been and gone. Hill, meanwhile, will feature in a Marley tribute concert in New York next month (December).

Incidentally, Hill has long since departed the movie version of Angels, with Thandie Newton strongly tipped to make up the trio alongside Drew Barrymore and Cameron Diaz, who are already locked in.

But then Newton had to drop out, so Angel No 3 is still up in the air, as it were.

Cut But Not Quite Dried

They met up again in Venice, where Nicole Kidman was No 1 photographers’ target when she turned up to promote Eyes Wide Shut, and Jane Campion was on hand with her competition entry, Holy Smoke. But, by all accounts, they found time to get together and talk about a new project. Well, not quite new: they have apparently been discussing it for the past couple of years. This time, though, it looks like happening. Subject to nobody changing their minds, of course. After all, this is the movies.

Kidman and Campion - both Australasians: Kidman is an Aussie, Campion a Kiwi - worked together on Portrait of a Lady, the film in which the former moved towards art-house and the latter toyed with the mainstream. Now, they are talking about an even more mainstream project: a movie version of an erotic thriller by Susanna Moore called In the Cut.

Kidman bought the rights to the novel herself; Campion has adapted it; and shooting is expected to start next autumn, after Kidman has starred opposite Ewan McGregor in Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge (which rolled on October 18). She will play a college professor in New York who has a dangerous affair with a police detective investigating a murder in her neighbourhood.

What everyone was talking about in Venice, however, was not who would play the detective: it was who would put up the money. The project started out with former PolyGram guys Stewart Till and Graeme Mason (at that stage part of the swiftly unravelling Universal Pictures International). Then, as tends to happen at film festivals these days, along came Harvey. In the end, however, Universal maintained its interest in the project, so In the Cut will be a joint Universal/Miramax production.

Tart Starts

With their first joint project - and his directorial debut - Crazy in Alabama out in the US, Melanie Griffith and Antonio Banderas are already in production with the second major movie from their Green Moon Productions.

Bearing the blunt title of Tart, it tells the story of a well brought-up young New York girl who gets heavily into the city’s underground club scene in the mid-eighties. The lead role will be played by Dominique Swain, who achieved notoriety (if not much exposure in either sense of the word) as the title character in Adrian Lyne’s fated Lolita.

Swain takes over the role from Anna Paquin, who decided she’d rather play a psychic in Bryan Singer’s X-Men. Griffith herself will play a cameo role, with other parts taken by Bijou Phillips (recently seen in Sugar Town), Brad Renfro (who was in Singer’s Apt Pupil) and Mischa Barton, the young star of Lawn Dogs (see Preview 25, almost three years ago).

Speaking of X-Men, over-runs on Mission: Impossible 2 - reportedly the subject of half the film-gossip web-sites in America - have prevented Dougray Scott from segueing from Australia to Hollywood to play Wolverine. His replacement is Australian actor Hugh Jackman (did they manage to transfer the flight booking from one to the other, I wonder?), who recently starred in Erskineville Kings.

Incidentally, Risk, the latest movie from the latter’s director, Alan White, is featured on page 11.