If you can't beat them join them: As the global domination of American cinema grows, more and more international filmmakers are turning to filming in English. Chen Kaige, the Chinese director of Palme d'Or-winning Farewell My Concubine, is about to film the erotic thriller, Killing Me Softly, which will star American actress Heather Graham.
The story, which deals with a research scientist who leaves her boyfriend for a dangerous relationship with a mysterious mountaineer, is based on the novel by Nicci French, the pen-name of married journalists Nicci Gerard and Sean French.
Another Cannes prize-winner, Danish writer-director Thomas Vinterberg is set to follow Festen with It's All About Love, an English-language film about two separated lovers, one of them a world-famous ice skater, who are reunited in New York and head off across the US in a bid to rebuild their relationship. "I want to throw myself into a larger exploration of life and this is a big love story which, in all humbleness, embraces the whole world," says Vinterberg. His film is set in the near future and apparently will cover themes from global freezing to the disappearance of gravity in Uganda.
PATRICE CHEREAU, the French film and theatre director whose Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train belatedly opens here in August, is working on Intimacy, a sexual drama based on Hanif Kureishi's stories, Intimacy and Night Light, and starring Mark Rylance, Kerry Fox, Timothy Spall and Marianne Faithfull. "This is a subject for a film that the English will consider terribly French while the French, on the other hand, find it typically English," says Chereau.
JAN SVERAK, the Czech director of the Oscar-winning Kolya, is in post-production on Dark Blue World, which is in English and in Czech, and features Tara Fitzgerald as an Englishwoman who becomes involved with two Czech pilots (Ondrej Vetchy from Kolya and Krystof Hadek) during the second World War. Charles Dance also features.
The hot young Spanish director, Alejandro Amenabar, who made Thesis and Open Your Eyes, is shooting his first English-language film, The Other, a Gothic horror movie, in Madrid, with a cast that includes Nicole Kidman and the young Irish actress, Elaine Cassidy. And Pedro Almodovar is developing his first film in English, The Paperboy.
Meanwhile, busy George Clooney is in talks to star in Unfaithful, Adrian Lyne's remake of Claude Chabrol's stylish 1968 drama, La Femme Infidele, in which a middle-class man, complacently satisfied with his marriage, discovers his wife is secretly involved with another man.
Clooney is likely to make Unfaithful before joining Brad Pitt and Julia Roberts in another remake, Steven Soderbergh's new version of the Rat Pack comedy, Ocean's 11. (The 1960 original is on BBC 2 this afternoon.)
Meanwhile, Clooney re-unites with his Three Kings co-star Mark Wahlberg in Wolfgang Petersen's big-budget Perfect Storm, which opens here next month, and he plays a vain, escaped convict in the new movie from Joel and Ethan Coen, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, due here in the autumn.
The equally prolific Anthony Hopkins will go from Florence, where he is filming the Silence of the Lambs sequel Hannibal for director Ridley Scott, to the Los Angeles set of Hearts of Atlantis, the Stephen King adaptation to be directed by Scott Hicks, who made Shine and Snow Falling on Cedars.
ART imitates art: It has been a very long time since Mel Brooks has produced anything remotely amusing for the cinema, so it's hardly surprising to find him returning to one of his earlier successes for his next venture. Brooks is about to turn his uproariously funny 1967 movie, The Producers, into a Broadway stage show, with Nathan Lane from The Birdcage and Love's Labours Lost in the leading role.
Ironically, the storyline deals with a failed Broadway producer who hits on a money-making scheme by staging a spectacularly bad play - and, convinced that it will prove a flop, lures far more backers than he needs, believing that there will be no hope of any of them recouping on their investment. The plan backfires when the show itself - with its outrageously kitschy and tasteless centrepiece musical number, Springtime for Hitler - is so bad that it has audiences rolling in the aisles.