Nicole to star with Ralph in a who-dug-it
Nicole Kidman and Ralph Fiennes are negotiating to star together in a film about the discovery of AngloSaxon treasures at Sutton Hoo.
The actress told me she and Fiennes had read Moira Buffini’s script, adapted from John Preston’s novel The Dig — a fictionalised look at the excavation of a royal burial chamber in Suffolk in 1939, where a 90ftlong ship was entombed 1,400 years earlier.
Kidman said the ‘delicate’ screenplay is ‘very much about the relationship between edith Pretty, who owned the land at Sutton Hoo, and Basil Brown, the archaeologist who found what was discovered there’.
She said she was ‘excited’ to be making a film with Fiennes. ‘i’ve wanted to work with him my whole life,’ she said.
The pair caught up with each other at the Telluride Film Festival, where both had world premieres of their respective movies.
Kidman was at the annual festival ( held in a box canyon in the Rocky Mountains) with director Karyn Kusama’s thriller Destroyer, in which she gives one of the year’s top performances as a burntout undercover sheriff ’s deputy in los Angeles.
Fiennes travelled to the former colorado mining town with The White crow — his most accomplished work as a director — about Rudolf Nureyev’s defection to the West in 1961. Fiennes also appears in the film as Alexander Pushkin, a mentor of Nureyev (played by ballet dancer oleg ivenko in an extraordinary screen debut).
Both films are being shown at the BFi london Film Festival next month.
The Dig will be directed by Simon Stone, an Australian celebrated for his contemporary adaptation of Federico Garcia lorca’s tragedy Yerma, a triumph at the Young Vic with Billie Piper in the central role. ‘How brilliant was Billie in that?’ Kidman asked.
Fiennes’ long- time cinematic partner Gabrielle Tana will produce the film.
Kidman hopes shooting will start next summer. ‘The British film industry gave me my great roles, so i’m raring to go,’ she said, referring to The Portrait of A lady, eyes Wide Shut and The Hours — for which she won an Academy Award.
RoSaMunD Pike gives a penetrating portrait of Marie Colvin in a superb film about the legendary war correspondent who was killed six years ago by Syrian forces while on assignment in the city of Homs. The actress and i were lunching at the Toronto branch of Soho House when she mentioned how she’d had to reassure some of Colvin’s friends that she had the grit to portray the prize-winning journalist; and that her rendition was not going to be some moviestar version of the real deal. She remembered telling them: ‘Don’t worry — i’m not going to look like this when i’m playing your friend.’ initially, Pike wondered if director Matthew Heineman might go for someone older to portray Colvin. ‘She was 56 when she died and i thought they might have found it easier to find someone older, to cast a woman closer to 50,’ said the 39-year-old, who played a Bond girl in 2002’s Die another Day not long after graduating from oxford. But she convinced the filmmaker she knew who Colvin was. ‘i feel i understand her, ’ she said. and watching
Hold the front page: Pike’s the real deal as a war reporter
a Private War at the Toronto international Film Festival, it became clear Pike did indeed understand the tough war correspondent enough to bring her to life on screen. it’s an electrifying performance.
During our lunch, Pike took from her handbag a letter she’d written to director Heineman (which he later returned to her) about what she thought of Colvin.
it was before she’d started doing her research on the celebrated Sunday Times journalist. Pike wrote that she saw Colvin as ‘clever, defiant, sexually strong, damaged, lonely, traumatised, ethical, daring, feminine — and masculine’.
More than a year after she penned those notes, Pike has absolutely nailed those traits on screen.
The actress has completely transformed herself. Her hair is mussed, her face etched with lines and she sports Colvin’s distinctive black patch to cover a lost eye, the result of a grenade attack in Sri Lanka.
She also behaves like a proper reporter: getting to the front line and getting the story; being daring and fearless (Colvin herself said ‘ fear comes later, when it’s all over’); and being bloody minded with her editors.
‘She was of the same belief as photographer Robert Capa, who said: ‘if your photo’s not good enough, it’s because you’re not close enough,”’ Pike told me, ‘which is why she had to go to the dangerous spots.’
The film’s combat scenes were shot in Jordan and the director staged several different war zones, but each time used refugees from the countries being depicted in that particular scene. For instance, for a sequence where Colvin interviewed Syrian widows ‘they were all Syrian women whose stories were painfully real’. Colvin comes across as complicated (aren’t we all), fierce and funny — and sometimes romantic, though her love life was often shambolic. ‘Her close friends said that she was most damaged by the men in her life,’ Pike said ruefully.
The man who was closest to her, later on, was the war photographer Paul Conroy. The pair were not romantically linked, but as played by Jamie Dornan, Conroy seemed to have taken the most care of her. There’s a beautiful scene, in the middle of a war zone, where Colvin reveals that underneath all of her sensible dusty clothes she was wearing a colourful La Perla bra.
a Private War will have a gala screening at the BFi London Film Festival on october 20 at Cineworld Leicester Square (