HAVING suffered a cerebral haemorrhage that paralysed her left side, French writer-director Catherine Breillat (56) has completed shooting her 11th feature film, Une Vielle Maitresse (An Old Mistress), which is now in post-production with a view to being selected for Cannes in May.
In hospital Breillat refused the use of anti-depressants or a wheelchair. She willed herself to walk and was released after five months. "Cinema saved my life," says the director, whose new film is set in 19th-century Paris and stars Asia Argento as a courtesan. Her earlier films include the provocative, sexually explicit dramas Romance, À Ma Soeur! and Anatomy of Hell.
"There is a lot of hatred toward me in France," she told the New York Times. "There is a discourse about me, that I am sulphurous, scandalous. Abroad they say I'm controversial. That, I don't mind. In any case, if everyone who criticised me had actually bought a ticket to see my films, I would be rich."
Give her (another) gong
Helen Mirren will have one more award to add to her very crowded shelf when she receives the best actress prize from the American Association of Retired People (Aarp) on Tuesday next. The group has voted Donald Sutherland as best actor for Aurora Borealis and Clint Eastwood as best director for his two Iwo Jima movies.
The Aarp award for Best Comedy for Grown-Ups will go to Little Miss Sunshine and the Best Movie for Grown-Ups to The Last King of Scotland.
Everything's A-OK for Nanni
As reported here last month, Nanni Moretti quit as artistic director of the Turin Film Festival just two days after accepting the post. In a terse statement, he said: "It is with great pain that I give up this job and leave you to your method problems, procedural disputes and personal grudges." Four weeks later, Moretti is back in the job. Everything "worked out" after all, he said, and he is now preparing his programme for the festival's 25th anniversary edition.
Moretti took the Palme d'Or for The Son's Room at Cannes in 2001, and The Caiman, his satire on former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, was a big hit in Italy last year.
It's in the blood
The daughters of Clint Eastwood and Robert Redford are following their fathers into the director's chair. Alison Eastwood (32) is now busy shooting her first feature, Rail and Ties, which stars Kevin Bacon and Marcia Gay Harden, both of whom were in her dad's Mystic River. And Amy Redford (34) is making her directing debut with The Guitar, scripted by US indies stalwart Amos Poe and starring Saffron Burrows as a woman told she has cancer and only two months to live.
The tale of bashful Hitch
Now 70 and having appeared in more than 100 movies and TV shows, Bruce Dern has written his autobiography, Things I've Said, But Probably Shouldn't Have, which will be published in the US in May. Dern, who starred in Alfred Hitchcock's final film, Family Plot (1976), explains in the book why Hitchcock refused to meet Steven Spielberg. Dern says he tried to persuade Hitchcock to meet the young director, who had scored his first big hit with Jaws.
"I said, 'You're his idol. He just wants to sit at your feet for five minutes and chat with you'. He said, 'Isn't that the boy who made the fish movie? I could never sit down and talk to him because I look at him and feel like such a whore'."
Puzzled, Dern asked Hitchcock why he felt that, and he replied: "Because I'm the voice of the Jaws ride [at Universal Studios]. They paid me a million dollars. And I took it and I did it. I'm such a whore. I can't sit down and talk to the boy who did the fish movie. I couldn't even touch his hand."
