"A man... fights only when he hopes, when he has a vision of order, when he feels strongly there is some connection between the earth on which he walks and himself." --V. S. Naipaul, The Mimic Men

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From the New York Times

For 'The Hours,' an Elation Mixed With Doubt
By MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM

It seemed at one moment I was sitting at my desk wondering if anyone would want to read "The Hours," my unorthodox novel in which Virginia Woolf was a prominent character, and the next I was on a set outside London, being asked by an assistant director if I'd like to stick around and see Nicole Kidman in her Virginia Woolf nose.
Like any sensible person, I said yes.

I have, over the last year and a half, had the distinctly surreal experience of seeing "The Hours" turned into a movie involving many of the most brilliant actors alive. The cast is dizzying: Nicole Kidman, Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore, Ed Harris, Toni Collette, Claire Danes, Jeff Daniels, Stephen Dillane, Allison Janney, John C. Reilly, Miranda Richardson and, briefly, as a clerk in a flower shop, the great Eileen Atkins, whose portrayal of Virginia Woolf in the play "Vita and Virginia" helped shape my own sense of how to write about Woolf.

Like any large experience, it has been heady and strange and more than a little upsetting. Before the movie deal was made, people sometimes asked me what actors I imagined playing my characters, and the only response I could offer was this: I have such a cogent image of these people that they'd have to play themselves. I can't picture them on any terms other than their own. Who, after all, would play your mother in the film version of her life? Your mother would have to do it. No one else is remotely like her.

So it was with a mix of elation and uncertainty that I greeted the news that the three main characters in "The Hours," the movie, would be played by Nicole Kidman, Meryl Streep and Julianne Moore. I had no doubts about these women's abilities but wondered if they'd be too thoroughly themselves, no matter how accomplished their performances.

"The Hours," the book and the film, is about three women alive at different times during the 20th century, all linked by Woolf's immortal novel of 1925, "Mrs. Dalloway." "Mrs. Dalloway," along with Joyce's "Ulysses," changed the novel forever by insisting that any day in anyone's life is the stuff of literature; that the whole human story is contained in every day of every life more or less the way the blueprint for an entire organism is present in every strand of its DNA. Woolf's novel takes place in one day, during which Clarissa Dalloway, a 52-year-old London society hostess, shops, sees the man she might have married but did not, takes a nap, and gives a rather dull party. However, because it is an ordinary day in the life of an ordinary person as rendered by a genius, by the book's end we understand that Mrs. Dalloway not only stands with the heroes of world literature but, by extension, that every one of us might stand so, if only a brilliant writer would look at us with sufficient depth and penetration.

"The Hours" (which was Woolf's original title for "Mrs. Dalloway") involves three days in the lives of three women. There's a modern-day Clarissa, played in the movie by Meryl Streep, who closely resembles Mrs. Dalloway but is free of some of the social strictures that bound Woolf's Clarissa. There's Laura Brown, a wife and mother at the end of World War II, played by Julianne Moore, who is reading "Mrs. Dalloway" and finding herself in its pages. And there is an imagined day in the life of Virginia Woolf herself, played by Nicole Kidman, when she began writing "Mrs. Dalloway" — when she, more than half suspecting she was merely an eccentric and marginal talent, set down the opening lines of a book that will be read as long as books exist.

My early fears about how the people of my book might be diluted by a movie version were allayed by Ms. Kidman's willingness to wear a wig and a prosthetic nose to play Woolf. I went to the English set, where a crumbling country mansion was standing in for the suburban house in which Woolf lived when she wrote "Mrs. Dalloway." I met Ms. Kidman, talked to her briefly about Woolf, and was asked if I'd like to see her in the Nose, which was the first I'd heard about Ms. Kidman appearing in any nose other than her own. She was escorted to the make-up room, from which she emerged an hour later as another person entirely. Not only was her face unrecognizable, but her stance had changed. She held her head more sternly; she set her shoulders slightly forward, as if trying to conceal the fact that she expected, at any moment, a blow from behind.

I learned, from each actor, that the process of transformation is as elusive and idiosyncratic as is the creation of characters in fiction. Ms. Kidman told me that although she did enormous preparation — she read all of Woolf, learned to mimic her handwriting, and had of course that remarkable patrician beak — what brought her to Woolf's essence was learning to roll her own cigarettes, as Woolf had done, combined with a modest white handkerchief Ann Roth, the costume designer, had put in the pocket of her dress. Somehow these two minor elements, the cowboyish cigarettes and the wan little hankie, produced the friction from which she could begin.

Julianne Moore prefers to do as little preparation as possible, and doesn't like to rehearse. She works intuitively; she simply knows what to do when she gets there. She and I did talk briefly about the genesis of Laura Brown, her character, before she did her scenes. I told her how I'd found, when I wrote the book, that Laura was the most difficult character to summon, in part because, of the three women, she was the one who veered most dangerously close to stereotype. We have seen the unhappy 50's housewife many, many times, and although Laura was in no way stereotypical to me, I couldn't seem to get her right. She came fully alive the day I decided to think of her as an artist; as someone as relentlessly driven to create perfection as was Woolf herself. Laura's medium was modest and transitory. She wanted to keep a house so clean that nothing could ever go wrong within its walls; she wanted to bake for her husband's birthday a cake as magnificent (as immortal) as the cakes in magazines. When I thought of her in those terms, and understood that she was every bit as entitled to her ecstasies and sorrows as was Woolf, she became a person.

When Meryl Streep and I met on the set in New York (I can be glimpsed in the movie, and had two lines with Ms. Streep that were cut from the final version, for which I will never forgive the filmmakers), she wanted to know what kind of music Clarissa listened to. Classic jazz, I told her, like Miles Davis and John Coltrane, and some of the lush Europeans, like Strauss and Schubert, especially Schubert's lieder. She, clearly knowledgeable, asked me which recordings of the Schubert lieder Clarissa would prefer, and I responded with what I believe to have been the most dignified possible look of mute incomprehension.

As I watched the women do their work, and when I saw the finished movie, I understood that what you lose in turning fiction into film — the ability to enter your characters' minds, and to scan their pasts for keys to their futures — can be compensated for by actors. You lose interiority. You gain Ms. Streep's ability to separate an egg with a furious precision that communicates more about Clarissa's history and present state of mind than several pages of prose might do. You gain Ms. Moore's face when she looks at her son with an agonizing mix of adoration and terror, knowing she will harm him no matter what she does.

Actors, too, if they're this good, can introduce details you can't convey on paper, if only because by writing them down you'd render them too obvious. Actors have the incidental at their disposal. Ms. Streep's Clarissa is stunningly complex, in part because she creates a whole person out of movements, expressions and inflections. When she says to Louis (Mr. Daniels), an old friend who's dropped in unexpectedly, "But I never see you," the line has a sing-song quality. It rises steadily to the word "see," then drops to the "you." It is offhand and girlish, venomous, haggard. And when she finally begins to lose her desperate composure there's a moment — a half-moment, you miss it if you blink — when she literally loses her balance, tips over to the left, and immediately rights herself. If there's a way to do things like that on paper, I haven't found it.

PROMINENT, too, among the movie's many satisfactions is Ms. Kidman's facility for conveying Woolf's immense charm and her unsettled mind with equal perfection. Woolf is often depicted as the dark lady of English letters, a spectral figure who glowers at us from the shady realm where genius and insanity meet. She did in fact suffer fits of profound depression, and she did end her life at 59, by putting a stone in the pocket of her coat and walking into a river. She also, however, wrote more directly and exquisitely than any writer I could name about the pure, simple joy of being alive. That's why I love her so. No one could have been better acquainted with the dangers and demons of the world, and yet part of what she left us were novels that speak, on nearly every page, to the delirious, all but overwhelming pleasures of living. Her love of life was hard-won, and utterly unsentimental. It survived her despair. Hers is an optimism we can trust.

I was thrilled, then, to see how thoroughly Ms. Kidman knew that, and how apparently effortlessly she managed to create a Woolf who was difficult, thorny and frighteningly fragile but was, at the same time, always the most compelling person in the room, funny and incisive, a woman so fiercely engaged by life that she's all but bursting from her contact with it.

And so I find myself in an enviable if slightly embarrassing position as one of the only living American novelist happy about his experience with Hollywood. These actors are not who I imagined when I wrote the book, but I feel as if they are reincarnations of people I've known intimately. It's as if people dear to me had died, and I find myself meeting them afterward, in other bodies, and simply knowing, from their gestures and their eyes, from some ineluctable familiarity, that these are they, returned.

There is this, too. My mother died a year ago last October, fairly suddenly, from cancer. I was with her in Los Angeles. She is not Laura Brown, Laura Brown is Laura Brown and my mother was my mother, but one uses what one knows. I worked some of my mother's qualities into Laura's character, and was guided by a certain sense of my mother's essence as I wrote the novel. As my mother began to seriously decline, I called Scott Rudin, the producer of "The Hours," and told him I didn't think my mother would get to see the finished film but I'd like to be able to show her something, anything. Scott arranged for a messenger to come to my parents' house from the Paramount studios with 20 minutes' worth of scenes on videotape. I found myself sitting on the sofa we'd had since I was an adolescent, holding the hand of my mother who would die within two weeks, and watching Julianne Moore play someone like my mother, someone who could not have existed if my mother hadn't existed. It was as if my mother were being reincarnated while she was still alive. It's no wonder we love the movies as much as we do.


Michael Cunningham's 1998 novel, "The Hours," won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

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...On The State of American Directors today...

THE YEAR IN MOVIES
A Coming of Age for the Next Generation
By A. O. SCOTT


To look back over the best movies of any year is at once to indulge in some fond, short-term nostalgia and also to engage in some tentative prophecy.

The critic's top-10 list is both a summing up of preferences and an attempt to intuit — even, with all due modesty, to influence — which films will still be talked about in years to come. This year the quality was such that I would not be too sorry to be proven wrong. At least 10 more wonderful movies — perhaps twice that many — lurk not so much beneath my list as alongside it, as though in a parallel universe.

And so I'm reluctant to summarize a year that still seems so strange and splendid; I'd rather relive it, to encounter once more the enchantment of seeing "Talk to Her" or "The Fast Runner" for the first time or the amazement of finding "Punch-Drunk Love" and "The Pianist" respectively more intoxicating and more overpowering on second viewings. But two related developments seem worth noting. Or perhaps it is just one development: the simultaneous flowering of a middle and a senior generation of world-class filmmakers.

One of the difficulties of being a young filmmaker must be when — or how — to stop being one. As the American indie wave of the 90's ebbed, it began to seem as if the insouciant energies of youth were ossifying into a state of permanent callowness. How many more comedies of commitment-phobia and urban anomie, how much more tongue-in-cheek, "ironic" brutality, would we have to endure? How many more breathless rediscoveries of the jump cut and the hand-held camera? When would the new generation overcome its hobbling sense of belatedness, of being perpetually in the shadows of the aging young lions of the old New Hollywood?

But then, in the last year or so, a cohort of directors and writers who had emerged with great (if sometimes unsung) promise over the last decade suddenly blossomed into maturity, without squandering the inventiveness that had been the source of their promise. Among the best movies of 2002 are a cluster of second, third and fourth features that, for all their differences, may herald the arrival of a new mainstream of ambitious, accessible filmmaking. A partial list would include Alexander Payne's "About Schmidt," Todd Haynes's "Far From Heaven," P. T. Anderson's "Punch-Drunk Love," Miguel Arteta's "Good Girl," Spike Jonze's "Adaptation" and Todd Solondz's "Storytelling."

These directors, all in their early 30's to mid 40's, share a generational trait of self-consciousness, but they seem to have overcome that smirky glibness that so often accompanies it. Their films are impressively, even dauntingly smart, but also, to a surprising degree, earnestly and deeply felt.

This is not only an American phenomenon; you find a similar fusion of intelligence and feeling in Mira Nair's "Monsoon Wedding" and Alfonso Cuáron's "Y Tu Mamá También." And this generation's master — its big brother or godfather — may well be Pedro Almodóvar, 51, who started out as a provocative rebel and whose latest film, "Talk to Her," was the best of the year.

But the old guard — who were themselves, of course, once members of the vanguard — has hardly faded away. Martin Scorsese released "Gangs of New York," his strongest film in a decade; Roman Polanski topped anything he has done in the last quarter century with "The Pianist"; and Steven Spielberg — putting out two of his best movies in a single year ("Minority Report" and "Catch Me if You Can") — continued to breathe new life into our battered faith in movies as the exemplary popular art form.

A few years ago, the centennial of cinema provoked elegies as well as celebration. Yes, the movies had a glorious past, but their future glory seemed to be in doubt. And now it has, astonishingly, arrived.

A New York Times article
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New York Times article on the state of indie films at Sundance

LOS ANGELES, Jan. 15 — Times are always tough in the indie world, and by all accounts they are particularly tough on the eve of this year's Sundance Film Festival, which opens Thursday night with a gala in Salt Lake City before moving up to Park City, Utah, for its remaining nine days.

Keith Gordon, whose latest film, "The Singing Detective," will be the opening night film in Park City, has yet to find a United States distributor for it. He wonders whether the film, based on Dennis Potter's groundbreaking British television mini-series from 1986, would generate anything like the bidding wars that have sometimes transformed Sundance into the buzz capital of the movie world.

"We decided that rather than shopping the movie around, we'd hold it back and really unveil it at Sundance," Mr. Gordon said. "Now, we'll see what happens."

Though Sundance continues to be the most important platform for American independent film and the one place where the entire indie world comes together to make deals and to take stock, there is a widespread sense that the market for independent film financing is depressed.

In interviews with more than a dozen filmmakers, producers and indie-film distributors in recent days, it became clear that the decline of the United States economy, the disappearance of much German financing and the near collapse of once-lucrative pay-television deals in Europe (and to a lesser extent in Asia) have forced filmmakers to seek new ways to finance and distribute their work.

Ed Solomon, a well-regarded screenwriter, whose first feature as a director, "Levity," will be featured at Thursday night's gala in Salt Lake City, described the six-year struggle to make the film, a drama about an ex-convict's uneasy return to society. "I went through that humiliating thing of calling friends of people who were related to people who had money," he said. "At one point, if the film hadn't happened, I'd have been forced to sell my house."

Even after Billy Bob Thornton agreed to play the lead role, and stars like Morgan Freeman and Holly Hunter joined the cast, it took Mr. Solomon another year to raise the cash. "In the end I had to be willing to make the movie for so little money that it was mathematically impossible for the financiers to lose their investment," he said. "That was the only way to get it done. And I wanted to get it done so badly that I was happy to do it."

Mr. Gordon did not have that kind of trouble with "Singing Detective." Though he had to shoot it on an extremely tight budget, by the time he came to the project, it was fully financed by Mel Gibson's production company, Icon, and had Robert Downey Jr. as its star and Mr. Gibson in a supporting role (as a bald, slouching, nearsighted psychiatrist).

But there is no question that filmmakers and stars are being forced to shoulder even more of the risk if they want to get their films made.

"It's a good thing for us," said John Schmidt, co-founder of ContentFilm, an indie production company. "It forces directors and producers to think more like entrepreneurs, to be creative about how they can shoot something at a certain budget and to attract stars willing to participate in the economics of the picture rather than taking their fees up front."

This has led some to explore new ways to finance and distribute independent films. Larry Meistrich, a founder of the defunct Shooting Gallery production company, has formed Film Movement, which mixes theatrical releases of its indie films in major cities, where they are likely to find an audience, with simultaneous DVD releases elsewhere. Civilian Pictures is considering an arrangement in which investors would buy stock in individual films much as they do in companies.

Geoffrey Gilmore, the festival's director, said he had heard the dire predictions from some that the money crunch would cause the number of films entered in the festival to dwindle. But thus far, he said, that has not happened. "We did have more entries arrive later than usual this year, partly, I think, because they didn't get their production money in time," Mr. Gilmore said. "There's no question that it's tough out there. But I think the result may be stronger movies. More of the films we're seeing are the products of a real personal passion rather than driven by commercial considerations."

In other words, when the dot-com and the pay-television millions were flowing in the 1990's, and filmmakers found it easier to raise cash, a lot of movies were inexpensive imitations of Hollywood genre pictures, intended to bring fledgling directors to the attention of the mainstream studios.

"We're not seeing many of those genre pictures anymore," Mr. Gilmore said. Tough times have weeded out all but the most passionate.

And despite the hard times, there is no shortage of aspiring filmmakers. The festival had 832 dramatic features submitted this year, Mr. Gilmore said, compared with 750 last year. Even more surprising, he said, the number of short films submitted jumped to 3,400 from 2,100 last year.

One result is that many more of the films are being shot with digital cameras, making them cheaper for a number of reasons, but mostly because there are no film costs. The number of digital dramatic features entered went to 537 from 440 last year, Mr. Gilmore said.

Predictions differ about how robust the acquisitions market will be at this year's festival. Last year Miramax jump-started the event by paying $5 million at the end of a brisk bidding war for the comedy "Tadpole," which went on to a disappointing theatrical release. In all, 26 films from last year's festival landed American distributors.

But this year many distribution executives — like Amir Malin, chief executive of Artisan Entertainment, and Jon Feltheimer of Lions Gate — say they see only a handful of movies at Sundance that interest them.

Bob Berney, president of Newmarket Films, said: "My sense regarding the market is that this doesn't seem to be a bidding war sort of year given the economics. But you never know."

Some of this talk is due to the annual stare-down that takes place between distributors and filmmakers in the days leading up to Sundance. Distributors always claim that the market is terrible, while filmmakers and their representatives claim a robust crop of potential money makers will be introduced and fought over.

John Sloss, one of the most active filmmaker representatives at Sundance, said he discounted the poor-mouthing from distributors who, after all, need films to distribute.

"If you look at the supply and demand, the demand is absolutely there," he said. "The last year was the most robust I can remember for specialized films. You would think that would translate very fluidly into more resources for financing, but so far there has been a sort of disconnect."

The issue, Mr. Malin said, is that for every indie hit there are dozens of films that barely register at the increasingly competitive art-house box office.

There will be 16 feature films in competition at this year's Sundance, from "The Cooler," with William M. Macy as an unlucky gambler, to "American Splendor," starring Paul Giamatti as a depressed comic-book author, and "Pieces of April," with Katie Holmes enduring the Thanksgiving dinner from hell.

Add to that 16 documentaries in competition, 26 world cinema offerings, a new section featuring 9 foreign documentaries and, out of competition, 17 features in the American Showcase series and 18 other premieres, and there will be plenty to fill up more than a dozen cinemas and makeshift screening rooms at the festival.

Mr. Gordon said that he was hoping to enjoy the experience and that he remained convinced that despite appearances independent film remains a potent force.

The arrival of a film like "Singing Detective" might indicate a lack of originality in the indie world. Are indie filmmakers now bowdlerizing foreign works much as American television networks and Hollywood studios have done? Not if you look below the surface.

Dennis Potter, who died in 1994, created this grimly comic story of a man plagued with debilitating psoriasis who escapes his torment by fantasizing about a film noir world in which he is a private eye. He also had the ideas to update the fantasy sequences from the florid 1940's to the grittier 50's and to transfer his detective from Britain to America.

"I'm just concentrating on the movie and letting the people at Icon worry about getting a U.S. distributor and the rest of it," Mr. Gordon said. "There's no question that this is a grim time for money in the independent film world. But I'm confident it's all going to work out."

At least one filmmaker, Larry Charles, has less to worry about going into Park City. His film, "Masked and Anonymous," with a cast including Bob Dylan, Jeff Bridges, John Goodman, Jessica Lange and Penelope Cruz, was picked up by Sony Pictures Classics on Tuesday.

"Selling the movie has never been an issue for me," said Mr. Charles, probably best known for his work on "Curb Your Enthusiasm," the HBO comedy series. "Bob Dylan told me a long time ago, don't look at the short term when it comes to this movie."

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