Alfonso’s War

A good few years ago, I meet a young(ish) director with half-a-dozen Dutch-language movies to his credit. He was especially dismissive of his latest film, a very well reviewed art-house allegory with lots of sex called The Fourth Man. Paul Verhoeven didn’t really want to make films like that, with sophisticated themes and clever camera angles, he said: he wanted to make “films like David Lean” - epic films for worldwide audiences. And he did.

I am reminded of Verhoeven by the recent career of Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón, who made the move north of the border with a couple of very upmarket studio movies - the brilliant A Little Princess and the somewhat less well-received Great Expectations - and now has his sights firmly set on a very different demographic: the male, 15-25-year-old, suburban multiplex crowd who make up the bulk of the modern American movie audience.

And, boy, does he go for it. In early September, Cuarón was busy resurrecting the movie version of John Grisham’s The Runaway Jury. Joel Schumacher was at one stage going to direct it; Sean Connery was going to be in it. But that was two years ago. And, with the passage of time, Grisham’s plot - about a case against the tobacco companies - has stopped seeming quite so dramatic, especially now that court rulings have started to go against the tobacco companies.

Then Michael Mann made The Insider, about a real life tobacco industry whistle-blower, which will be out in time for Christmas. So - been there, done that - Cuarón and Grisham started reworking the screenplay with the tobacco industry replaced by the gun lobby. In the aftermath of Columbine High, that seemed a lot more topical.

Two weeks later, however, all this got pushed into the background by news of something even closer to the mainstream movies Cuarón dreamed of making: Hart’s War, based on a novel with its origins in the real-life war-time exploits of Nicholas Katzenbach, who was Attorney General under LBJ. It’s a legal thriller set in a WWII prisoner-of-war camp.

The director is currently at work on the screenplay with Jim Sheridan’s regular collaborator, Terry George, and production is expected to start in February. But the Grisham project, he insists, is still very much in the works.

Love Among the Daffodils

The last time they made a movie about a couple of poets, things didn’t turn out quite as well as expected, even though Leonardo DiCaprio played one of them. That was, of course, Total Eclipse, about Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine.

William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge were, however, poets of a different era. They weren’t French, they weren’t decadent and they didn’t live in squalor (although Coleridge did experiment with drugs). And, while Pandemonium - a film about their friendship - may not boast one of the world’s most expensive movie stars, it does have a pretty impressive cast.

Linus Roache (Wings of the Dove) plays Coleridge and John Hannah (Sliding Doors) is Wordsworth. Their respective lady friends are played by Emily Woof and Samantha Morton (one of the busiest of British actresses, following Dreaming of Joseph Lees, The Last Yellow and Jesus’ Son); the screenplay is by Frank Cottrell Boyce (Welcome to Sarajevo, Hilary and Jackie); the director is Julien Temple; and production started in mid-September.

Cottrell Boyce, meanwhile, has also written the screenplay for Michael Winterbottom’s medium-budget western, Kingdom Come (Winterbottom directed Welcome to Sarajevo), the story of an Irish immigrant who sells his wife and daughter for a gold claim then, 20 years later, tries to make up for doing so.

Peter Mullan - Best Actor at Cannes in 1998 for My Name Is Joe - plays the immigrant. Madonna was at one stage interested in playing his wife, but that role has now gone to Charlize Theron, with Wes Bentley, Nastassja Kinski and Sarah Polley (who is currently starring with Sean Penn and Catherine McCormack in Kathryn Bigelow’s The Weight of Water - see page 11). And production is due to start in Canada early in the New Year.

Dr T’s Women

Robert Altman’s new movie, Dr T and the Women (mentioned here back in July), has been acquiring quite an ensemble cast these past few months, notwithstanding one major defection.

Readers with better-than-average memories will recall that Richard Gere was already in place to play the title character, a gynaecologist who is dominated by the women in his life (or, as Altman prefers to say, “pussy-whipped”). Next to sign up was Goldie Hawn as Dr T’s wife, followed shortly by Hawn’s real-life daughter, Kate Hudson, who will play her daughter in the movie. She will also be a cheerleader for the Dallas Cowboys.

Also cast are Laura Dern, Helen Hunt, Liv Tyler (who gave what was arguably the best performance in Altman’s last movie, Cookie’s Fortune) and Tara Reid, who is to play Hawn’s other daughter.

Except that, as of mid-October, it isn’t Hawn any more: it’s Farrah Fawcett, whose screen career was relaunched after her memorable (if brief) turn in Robert Duvall’s movie, The Apostle. Shooting was due to start shortly after this issue of Preview went to press: on November 15, in Texas.

Gérard Goes to the Dogs

Now that he is well into middle-age, Gérard Depardieu’s hellraiser bad-boy image has been replaced by a softer, cuddlier image - and nowhere more so than in his directorial debut, Un pont entre deux rives/The Bridge, where he plays a husband very much on the losing end of a love affair.

But that doesn’t mean Gérard can no longer play somewhat larger-than-life villains. And that is just what he is scheduled to do in the sequel 102 Dalmatians (I trust I don’t have to tell you what that is a sequel to), which is set to roll in London in the middle of this month (November).

Depardieu will play M LePetit, No 1 henchman to Cruella DeVil (who will be played once again by Glenn Close). Kevin Lima, one of the directors of the animated Tarzan - from, of course, Dalmatians-maker Disney - will direct.

Check Mates

Her English-language follow-up to her 1996 Best Foreign-Language Film Oscar for Antonia’s Line - a star-studded movie version of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway - may have been politely received, but it didn’t exactly make her a household name. Nor frankly, will Dutch director Marleen Gorris’ next film. But she is certainly sticking with her predilection for literary classics and top-line casts.

This time, there is a sort of parallel with her own career, too: The Luzhin Defence was written by Vladimir Nabokov, a novelist who made his name working - like Gorris - in a language other than his own.

It tells the story of a chess Grand Master who, on a tour through Italy, falls in love with a young woman holidaying there. John Turturro plays the Grand Master, with Emily Watson as the young woman - one of the more intriguing on-screen combinations since Harold and Maude.

Plus . . .

All credit to Madonna for constantly reinventing herself: the old ‘material girl’ tag now seems almost quaintly historical. But who would have said ‘Noel Coward’? Well, veteran British director Gavin Millar, for one: he has just cast her in a movie adaptation of Coward’s Quadrille. The actress, who recently completed The Next Best Thing opposite regular friend and companion Rupert Everett, will play a deserted wife who sets off for the South of France in pursuit of her errant husband, accompanied by the husband of the woman he has run off with - hence the title. Other casting has yet to be announced, but the film is due to go into production early in the New Year.

And Halle Berry has signed to play the female lead in the Eddie Murphy space comedy, Pluto Nash. Murphy plays a guy trying to make a fresh start on the lawless, corruption-ridden Moon, but finds himself fighting off the attempts of big-business interests to take the place over. This is the first movie Berry and Murphy have done together since Boomerang in 1992. Ron Underwood will direct and production is expected to start early next year.