yearbook 2004/05 - The European Film College

process began with our in-house team, headed
by director Anand Tucker. Then one day I had
a classic English phone call from Mike Newell
saying that he had been trying to get hold of
the rights to the novel and had heard that we
already had them, but that if we were still trying
to find a director, do please bear him in mind. At
the time in 2002 when he called me, Mike was
a director who could green-light pretty much
any Hollywood movie, so that call was pretty
tempting from the point of view of putting the
financing together. Once I told our financiers
that Mike was “interested” they got fantastically
excited, but at the same time, for us, it was the
beginning of something of a nightmare. Suddenly
the decisions about the production revolved
around paying the right price for a Mike
Newell film - much more so than anything to
do with the project itself. I found myself in the
middle of a battle where the financiers wanted
Mike Newell’s label on the film at the expense of
almost everything else. All of a sudden the financiers
were starting to look for big names, and
as you heard Olivia say, we weren’t quite sure
we wanted that. But the casting is important
if you want to make a film, so we had to look
around. The girl who suddenly wanted the part
was Kate Hudson, Goldie Hawn’s daughter. She
has just starred in an English movie, and was
desperate to get the role. She came to London,
and did all sort of things to get to meet Mike.
It was quite shocking how much work she had
done to understand the story! Mike Newell,
who is known for his extraordinary ability with
actors, liked her potential, and maybe he was
right. The difficulty is always to balance the purity
of one’s original idea with the practicality of
getting the thing done. Anyway, to cut a long
story short, four weeks before the shooting I
got a phone call from Mike Newell giving me
the extraordinary news that Kate had decided
not to do the film after all! You try as a producer
to think ahead as to what problems there are
going to be, anticipating as many difficulties as
EVENTS
possible, but one thing that we did not see coming
was that the girl who had been pursuing us
and who had worked so hard to get the role,
would be the one to suddenly turn around and
say that she was not going to do it!
M Le F: And what about Mike Newell himself?
Why did he withdraw from the picture?
A P: It was one of those things. I have the greatest
respect for him. Mike Newell is a fantastic
director and a wonderful human being to be
with, but I had no real relationship with him.
As soon as you get a director of that calibre,
then my job as a producer is subtly altered. The
project moves out of your hands in ways that
you can’t foresee. After he left we talked about
Peter Webber, who had been an editor in our
company and had done documentaries for TV
and drama. I think that we took the view that
if we were going to do this, then it would be
on OUR terms. At the same time, I sent the
script to Pathé in London, who loved it and
were only troubled by the scale of the budget
(around $10 million). Let’s face it: 17th century
setting arthouse films have a rather limited audience!
But we persevered with them. Pathé is
both a distribution and a production company,
and the good thing about them is that they are
Anglo-French, so if all went well, two important
territories, at least, would be tied into the
deal. The remaining money we were looking for
needed to come from America. I took Peter out
to Los Angeles and
introduced him to
the actor Ralph Fiennes
who was very
important in terms
of reassuring Hollywood
that this
was a director to
be taken seriously.
The two men hit
it off immediate-