The award-winning Toronto-based filmmaker, Atom Egoyan, and the gifted English actor-turned-director, Tim Roth, are both set to visit Dublin next month to participate in public interviews organised by The Irish Times and the Film Institute of Ireland.
The remarkably versatile Tim Roth made a memorable film debut in Alan Clarke's Made in Britain and went on to work for, among many others, Mike Leigh in Meantime, Stephen Frears in The Hit, Peter Greenaway in The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, Tom Stoppard in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Robert Altman in Vincent and Theo, Quentin Tarantino in Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, and Woody Allen in Everyone Says I Love You.
He makes his directing debut with The War Zone, based on the 1989 novel by Alexander Stuart which Anthony Burgess described as "a pungent, shocking book, superbly written". The film features Freddie Cunliffe as Tom, a 15-year-old boy whose middle-class family moves from London to Devon, where he discovers that his father (Ray Winstone) is sexually abusing Tom's sister (Lara Belmont).
The public interview with Tim Roth will take place on Wednesday, August 18th, and will be preceded by a screening of The War Zone. A week later, on either August 25th or 26th, Atom Egoyan will participate in a public interview, which will follow a screening of his acclaimed new film, Felicia's Journey, based on the novel by William Trevor and starring Bob Hoskins and the young Irish actress, Elaine Cassidy, along with Arsinee Khanjian, the actress who is married to Egoyan and has featured in all his feature films.
Born in Cairo and raised in Canada, Atom Egoyan has received many awards for his feature films over the past 15 years - Next of Kin, Family Viewing, Speaking Parts, The Adjuster, Calendar, Exotica, and The Sweet Hereafter, which last year earned him an Oscar nomination for best director. His short films include Bach Suite €4: Sarabande, based on the work of cellist Yo Yo Ma, and a segment for the six-part feature, Montreal Vu Par. Last year Egoyan directed Gavin Bryar's opera, Dr Ox's Experiment, at English National Opera, and the premiere of his own original opera, Elsewhere, in Canada.
TO nobody's surprise, Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Men- ace smashed Irish box-office records when it opened last weekend to audiences which included dozens of young men wielding light sabres in the aisles. The film took £719,961 - £171,961 more than the previous record-holder, Titanic - and passed the £1 million mark on Tuesday night. In the US Phantom Menace passed the $400 million mark this week, but seems unlikely to surpass the US takings of Titanic and the 1977 Star Wars. In Ireland, the prequel has a long way to go to overtake the record total of £7.5 million taken by Titanic, and it is feasible, despite its big opening, that it may not surpass the £4.2 million taken here by Michael Collins.
Meanwhile, for the sixth consecutive week, there is a new number one at the weekly US box-office. Having made $21.7 million in its first three days, the late Stanley Kubrick's eagerly awaited Eyes Wide Shut takes the top slot, dethroning the reputedly very smutty adolescent comedy, American Pie, which cost $11 million to make and has taken over $45 million in just 10 days. It opens here in October. To qualify for the R (Restricted) rating in the US, 65 seconds of the extended orgy sequence in Eyes Wide Shut had to be hidden by digital impositions of less offensive material. In Ireland, film censor Sheamus Smith has passed the movie uncut with an 18 certificate and it opens here on September 10th.
Following the video release of Dancing at Lughnasa and Sweety Barrett, the new video outlet, Clarence Irish Classics, has released 12 Irish movies for rental at Xtra-Vision stores across the country: My Left Foot, The Field, Into the West, Ailsa, Guiltrip, The Boy From Mercury, Nothing Personal, The Disappearance of Finbar, A Further Gesture, A Man Of No Importance, Moondance and How to Cheat in the Leaving Certificate. All 12 will be available to purchase from September.
Clarence has also acquired the hit Australian comedy, The Craic, featuring and written by Jimeoin, which was well received at Galway Film Fleadh this month. It goes on video rental release here over the August bank holiday weekend. Another new Irish video label is Merlin Video, which has been set up by Merlin Films and Hummingbird Records. Its first release will be Paul Quinn's This Is My Father, which will be in stores from Monday. A statement from the company says that "Merlin Films has established close relations through its LA office with film distributors such as Alliance in Canada and Barron Entertainment in Australia. So be prepared for a long line of quality Irish and Hollywood films from this new company."
The director John Mackenzie see striking similarities between When the Sky Falls, his film featuring Joan Allen as a character based on the murdered Irish journalist Veronica Guerin, which he recently finished shooting in Dublin, and his 1979 London gangster film, The Long Good Friday.
"The hero's a woman but the spectrum of the movie - gangsters, crooks, drugs - is similar," Mackenzie told the Los Angeles Times. "It's also done with a specific time, era and city, which is what I tried to do with The Long Good Friday. When I come to Dublin now it reminds me of London in the 1980s - all those new buildings and affluence."
Scott Rudin and David Brown, the producers of Angela's Ashes, also have first rights on author Frank McCourt's sequel, Tis, which will be published in the autumn. Tis follows McCourt's life after he emigrates to New York as a young man. Alan Parker's film of Angela's Ashes, which stars Emily Watson and Robert Carlyle, is due for release in the US in December, to qualify for Oscar nominations, and here in the spring.
The first film from stage director Sam Mendes - American Beauty - is causing a major stir in Hollywood despite the fact it will not be released until the autumn. Steven Spielberg is telling colleagues that it's one of the best films he's seen in years, while one of the stars, Annette Bening, reportedly was so overcome when she saw it that she burst into tears. Made for a modest £10 million, American Beauty stars Bening and Kevin Spacey as an upper-middleclass couple whose marriage and lives are unravelling. Mendes, who staged the recent London and Broadway revivals of Cabaret and directed Nicole Kidman and Iain Glen in The Blue Room, said he had been offered many movies to direct but, he said: "Because I'm a Brit, I kept getting costume dramas and anything with royalty."
Then Spielberg showed him the script of American Beauty. "It's a difficult movie to describe," says Mendes. "It sounds like some dreadful sitcom on speed but it's not at all. It's filled with loneliness, but beneath the surface it's very funny."
Quote of the week: Discussing his work in an interview with Film West magazine, film censor Sheamus Smith comments: "I never judge anything in advance. I judge it by what I see on the screen, not by word of mouth. And I would have a script in most cases, just to refer to - particularly if it's a complicated language, or, I frequently say, if somebody doesn't speak English, like Sylvester Stallone. You need a script to know what they're saying."
