The young Irish actor, Stuart Townsend, is hotly tipped to secure the central role of Aragorn (or Strider) in Peter Jackson's mega-budget film trilogy of J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord Of The Rings, which will be shot over an 18-month, back-to-back schedule in Jackson's native New Zealand. Townsend starred in Shooting Fish and Resurrection Man, and will soon be seen in Michael Winterbottom's Wonderland and Gerry Stembridge's All About Adam; he emerged as the favourite to play Aragorn after Daniel Day-Lewis turned it down. The Lord of the Rings cast is also likely to feature Ian McKellen as Gandalf, Ian Holm as Bilbo Baggins and Elijah Wood as Frodo.
Ireland will be the subject of this year's national cinema focus at the Montreal World Film Festival, which opens next Friday with Patricia Rozema's film of Mansfield Park, starring Frances O'Connor, Jonny Lee Miller, Alessandro Nivola and Embeth Davidtz. The festival will screen 16 Irish features or shorts: Accelerator, Park, I Could Read The Sky, The Last September, A Love Divided, Love and Rage, Making Ends Meet, Night Train, Rotha Mor an tSaoil, Le Dernier Mot, States of Fear, Us Boys, Elsewhere, Fatal Extraction, Still Life and The Tale of the Rat That Wrote.
An Irish short film, Between Dreams, directed by Ian Fitzgibbon, has been selected for competition at next month's Venice Film Festival. The film is based on the hospital memoirs of the actor and screenwriter Stephen Tredre, who died of cancer in 1997. The cast includes David Westhead, Lloyd Owen, David Harewood, Paul Hickey, Michael McElhatton and Barry Cassin. The film was made as part of the latest round in the Short Cuts series. ere of Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut. The feature films in competition at Venice include Mike Leigh's Topsy Turvy, Jane Campion's Holy Smoke, Lasse Hallstrom's The Cider House Rules, Abbas Kiarostami's Le Vent Nous Emportera, Zhang Yimou's Not One Less, and the first film directed by Antonio Banderas, Crazy in Alabama.
What is it about soccer movies that makes them so unwatchable? There have been some wretched examples, such as Escape to Victory, Yesterday's Hero and When Saturday Comes, while The Match, produced by Pierse Brosnan and starring Max Beesley and Richard E. Grant, opened to mostly negative reviews in Britain this month. Yet film-makers keep on trying. The Irish director Mary McGuckian is now in post-production on the George Best biopic written by and starring her actor husband John Lynch. Working Title Films is developing a movie, The Busby Babes, dealing with the 1958 Machester United team, many of whom were killed in the Munich air crash. Robert Duvall is producing and starring in The Cup, as the manager of one of the worst football teams in Scotland and he's joined in the cast by real-life Scottish player Ally McCoist. Little Voice director Mark Herman is working on the comedy, Season Ticket. In Romania, the veteran midfielder Gheorghe Hagi is preparing to star as a defender in the comedy-drama, Number One, while in Spain, Lola Films is making The Goalkeeper, in which a man travels around villages with his goalposts and makes a living by inviting people to take pot shots at him.
At last, a new film is on the way from Kathryn Bigelow, her first since Strange Days four years ago. Sean Penn, Sarah Polley and Catherine McCormack will star in her latest project, The Weight of Water, based on Anita Shreve's novel about a journalist investigating murders that took place 100 years ago. Meanwhile, Helen Hunt, Richard Gere and Liv Tyler will star in Robert Altman's next movie, Dr T And The Women, in which Gere will play a gynaecologist who becomes entangled with the many women in his life. Hunt will fit the film in during the break from Cast Away which has been put on hold to allow its star Tom Hanks, who plays a man shipwrecked on a desert island, to diet down to an emaciated state.
David Mamet's next film as a director will be the comedy, State And Maine, which will feature Alec Baldwin, Sarah Jessica Parker, Rebecca Pigeon, William H. Macy and Patti Lupone. It deals with a film crew and cast arriving to shoot a movie in rural New England, where the townsfolk quickly learn how to make money out of the visitors. Mamet's film of The Winslow Boy is due to open here in October.
Mamet is at present involved in writing the screen adaptation of Thomas Harris's Silence of the Lambs follow-up, Hannibal, which Ridley Scott will direct. Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins will not decide about repeating their Lambs roles until they have read Mamet's script - and there is no truth in the widely circulated rumours that Sarah Michelle Gellar will star in the movie of Hannibal.
The next film from Olivier Assayas, whose Late August, Early September opens in Dublin today, is a period drama adapted from Jacques Chardonne's trilogy, Les Destinees Sentimentales. This long-cherished project of the director is set in the early 1900s and deals with a former clergyman who divorces his wife, marries another woman and settles in Switzerland. When he has to return to France to take over the family porcelain busiess, there is a threat to his second marriage. The film stars Charles Berling, Isabelle Huppert and Emmanuelle Beart.
