Stephen Rea, Brendan Gleeson and Gavin Friday are all likely to join the cast of Neil Jordan's film of the Patrick McCabe novel Breakfast On Pluto, which features Cillian Murphy and Liam Neeson and starts shooting on September 6th, writes Michael Dwyer.
Murphy plays the central character, an Irish transvestite aspiring to be a supermodel in London, and he has been preparing for the role by going around London in drag.
Jordan's 14th feature film, it will be his ninth film with Rea, his third with Gleeson and Neeson, and his second McCabe adaptation (following The Butcher Boy). The lighting cameraman on Breakfast in Pluto is Declan Quinn, who last worked here on In America and recently completed Mira Nair's Vanity Fair. The production designer is Tom Conroy and the costume designer is Eimer Ní Mhaoldomhnaigh. The movie will be shot on locations in Dublin, Co Kilkenny, Northern Ireland and London.
Summer cinema bypass
Although there are many more cinema releases this summer than in recent years, more and more movies with high-profile directors and actors are being consigned directly to video and DVD here. Among the latest are Bob Rafelson's thriller No Small Deed, starring Samuel L. Jackson, Milla Jovovich and Stellan Skarsgård; István Szabó's postwar drama Taking Sides, with Skarsgård and Harvey Keitel; Damien Nieman's Shade, a drama about poker hustlers in Los Angeles with Sylvester Stallone, Melanie Griffiith, Gabriel Byrne and Stuart Townsend; Rob Reiner's comedy Alex and Emma, starring Luke Wilson and Kate Hudson; Martin Campbell's Beyond Borders, with Angelina Jolie as an American having an adulterous affair with a relief worker (Clive Owen) in Africa; Bill Bennett's Australian comedy The Nugget, with Eric Bana; and The Assassination Tango, in which Robert Duvall directs himself as a hit man in Argentina.
Aniston for postgraduate
Charles Webb's novel The Graduate has provided the basis for the scintillating 1967 Mike Nichols movie starring Anne Bancroft and Dustin Hoffman, and a recent stage play.
Now Jennifer Aniston is to play a young woman who discovers that her family's darkest secret was the inspiration for Webb's book, and she may have been the biological offspring of that adulterous liaison. Screenwriter Ted Griffin will direct the as-yet-untitled movie, which also features Charlie Hunnam, Mark Ruffalo, Mena Suvari, and Kevin Costner as the older incarnation of Hoffman's Benjamin Braddock character.
Eccleston: not violent
Production company Working Title, screenwriter Michael Hirst and publisher Pan Macmillan have publicly apologised to actor Christopher Eccleston over comments about him in the book Laundrettes and Lovers. He took a libel action over the false claim that he threatened Hirst with violence over a suggestion as to how he should play his role in Elizabeth.
Eccleston was particularly concerned about the damage to his reputation among the many producers, directors and actors to whom Working Title had sent a copy. The defendants agreed to pay him "substantial" damages (donated to charity) and to circulate the court apology to everyone who received the book.
The war on television
Released in the UK just a fortnight ago today, the acclaimed documentary Control Room is scheduled for transmission on BBC2 a fortnight from tomorrow, on August 21st, two days after it screens at the Edinburgh festival.
The film observes the progress of the war in Iraq from the point of view of the Al-Jazeera newsroom, located just next to the US Army Central Command in Qatar. The film's director Jehane Noujaim, who made Startup.com, spent six weeks in the Al-Jazeera newsroom and the neighbouring coalition media centre.
Sir Laurence returns
Making a screen comeback 15 years after his death, Laurence Olivier joins Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow and Angelina Jolie in the retro science-fiction romp Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, which opens here in October.
"He plays my nemesis," Law says. "He's referred to throughout the movie so you know eventually you're going to get to see this bad guy. You only see him in the last minutes, in hologram form." Another actor provided Olivier's voice, and images of him come from assorted films and archive footage.
