A film by Lavinia Currier Based on the memoir by Louis ... - FDb.cz

Eyes shot entirely on location in Hong Kong.
ABOUT THE CREW
LAVINIA CURRIER – DIRECTOR, CO-WRITER, PRODUCER
<strong>Lavinia</strong> <strong>Currier</strong> is a <strong>film</strong> director, screen writer, producer and environmentalist with a diverse
interest in the interplay of the arts and ecology. She studied poetry at Harvard University with Professor
Robert Fitzgerald, the renowned translator of Greek classics, and then acting with Sanford Meisner at the
Neighborhood Playhouse in New York. While absorbing Meisner’s groundbreaking approach of "living
truthfully under imaginary circumstances," <strong>Currier</strong> served as production assistant to director James Ivory
for his <strong>film</strong> Jane Austen in Manhattan. This assignment led to Ivory, and his partners Ismail Merchant and
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala becoming mentors both for their art and their remarkable working relationships.
Her first formal directing was staging liturgical and passion plays at New York’s Cathedral of Saint
John the Divine in collaboration with John–Michael Tebelak, the award-winning writer of the musical
Godspell. Then in Paris, <strong>Currier</strong> directed and acted in American plays in English at a theatre that her
Harvard classmate founded in a building inherited from her great aunt Isadora Duncan.
<strong>Currier</strong> wrote, directed and <strong>film</strong>ed her first feature Heart of the Garden at her family farm in
Virginia. The production, shot <strong>by</strong> cinematographer Edward Lachman, included a sound track featuring her
Harvard classmate cellist Yo Yo Ma, playing Bach underneath a tree. This professional debut won a 1985
Gold Eagle Cine award in the entertainment category.
Her first full-length feature, Passion in the Desert (1997), was inspired <strong>by</strong> Honore de Balzac’s
novella about a French army officer in Napoleon’s 1798 invasion of Egypt, played <strong>by</strong> award-winning actor
Ben Daniels. Lost and alone in the Saharan desert after Muslim warriors attack, the soldier finds himself in
a mysterious relationship with a female leopard that has saved his life. <strong>Currier</strong> developed her now signature
style of evoking vivid atmospheres and bringing the landscape alive in equal importance with the human
characters. Following years of scouting and preparation, she <strong>film</strong>ed the actors in Jordan, and shot the
dangerous and often unhappy leopards in Moab, Utah the following summer. A defining point in gaining
confidence as a director came when the leopard cubs, that a trainer purchased and raised for the role,
refused to cooperate. Her intuitive problem-solving that managed to complete the <strong>film</strong> also taught her a
more flowing and receptive approach. The feature received special recognition for excellence in <strong>film</strong>-
making from the National Board of Review and was widely acclaimed in Europe and the United States.
Subsequently, she wrote and directed “Beautiful Swimmer,” a fable about the Chesapeake Bay.