February 26, 2003
- Imdb tells October 30, 2003 as release date for "Luther" in Germany
February 17, 2003
- If anyone is registered for This is London, please do us the favour and send us the article about Joe and Love's Labour's Lost from the arts section - we can't get to it without providing credit card details.
- Joe in March issue of Harpers & Queen: Joe appears in a picture in the "Party People" section at the back of H&Q (page 293). It's from the opening of Le Touessrok hotel where he appeared with a woman called Tarezz Lee. The picture will be scanned in as soon as possible.
- Killing Me Softly will be available from April 7th on DVD and Video in the UK.
February 9, 2003
- Joe no longer attached to Blind Flight
Sunday Times, 9 Feb:Culture: Blind Flight sees the light
After a wait of more than 10 years, filming has started in Glasgow on a movie charting Brian Keenan’s ordeal at the hands of terrorists in 1980s Beirut, writes Brian Pendreigh
Ian Hart may not figure at the top of Hollywood’s A-list, but the spiky Liverpudlian has played Dr Watson, Professor Quirrell in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, and no less an icon than John Lennon in the film Backbeat. So, for most people, having him represent you on screen might generate some emotion other than indifference. But Brian Keenan is not most people.
Only a handful of individuals can begin to understand what it means to spend four and a half years in a series of tiny, cockroach-infested cells, chained to a radiator, beaten by guards, kept in the dark, both physically and metaphorically — punishment for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, Beirut in 1985. After such an experience, it is hardly surprising if it no longer seems important whether you are played on screen by Brad Pitt or Rowan Atkinson.
Not that Keenan did not have fantasies during the time he was a political pawn in the hands of Shi’ite Muslim fundamentalists in Lebanon. It was his fantasies that kept him alive. Alone for five months, he created an imaginary friend, Turlough O’Carolan, a blind 17th-century Irish harpist. When O’Carolan was replaced by a real friend, fellow hostage John McCarthy, the two planned an elaborate expedition to South America. After their release they wrote their individual books about captivity, then lived out their fantasies, went to Patagonia, and wrote about that too.
While seeing their lives turned into a movie may be a fantasy for some, it is a return to reality for Keenan. Blind Flight recreates the story of Keenan and McCarthy’s imprisonment, with Hart as Keenan and Linus Roache as McCarthy, who worked with Keenan on the script. It has been shooting for the past few weeks in the unlikely setting of Maryhill, Glasgow, in tiny studios in a former road haulage yard, that were once home to comic charcter Rab C Nesbitt.
It has been a long haul. Blind Flight began life more than 10 years ago as a possible docu-drama. “Well, isn’t that the nature of the film business,” says Keenan matter-of-factly, in an Irish lilt that manages to sound gentle and insistent at the same time.
“That’s what happens. Films take years. There’s so many people who have to have an involvement, producers, insurance companies; and going through directors. And it’s a very, very hard one to put together. And most directors with any kind of imaginative talent would think, God, these guys wrote this script and they’re still alive. So they’re frightened of that. I would be if I was them.”
Blind Flight was set to shoot with Hart as Keenan and Joseph Fiennes as McCarthy, but the financial backing fell apart in the uncertainty after September 11 and it looked like the film might never get made. Others would have been driven to despair. “It didn’t worry me that much,” insists Keenan. The film has now been resurrected with first-time director John Furse and Edinburgh producer Eddie Dick, who secured £450,000 of lottery money in exchange for a promise to shoot in Glasgow, as well as Ireland and North Africa, with the make-shift cells reconstructed in the Glasgow television and film studio.
To understand Keenan’s seeming nonchalance to all delays, one has to appreciate his motive for initiating the project, and that it was not simply that he wanted to see himself up there on the screen with new features courtesy of Ian Hart or Ben Affleck. “I worked on the script before I wrote the book,” he explains, in a reference to An Evil Cradling. “I conceived the whole thing because I got home before the others did. I saw it as a way of using a kind of docu-drama to raise consciousness and to get people to put pressure on the British government, which was the idea at the back of my head, of this kind of campaign.”
Keenan was freed in August 1990, but McCarthy was released in August 1991, before Keenan could get his docu-drama made. The Church of England envoy Terry Waite was released at the end of 1991. The following year An Evil Cradling was published and a Granada-HBO drama, Hostages, was broadcast, with Ciaran Hinds as Keenan, Colin Firth as McCarthy and a script by Bernard MacLaverty.
Keenan now dismisses his experiences as “an incident in history . . . long since past”. He moved on to other projects. He is remarkably down-to-earth about it all and about life in general. But you do not walk away from such an ordeal the same man, surely? Born in Belfast in 1950, Keenan left school at 15 and was an apprentice plumber before going to university to study literature. He taught in Belgium and Spain, did a community care course in Aberdeen and community work in Belfast, but he was frustrated by “politicians fighting and bitching” and went to work at the American University in Beirut in 1985 on a short-term contract, en route to Australia.
He was kidnapped and held hostage by Hezbollah militia demanding the release of prisoners in Israel. McCarthy was a journalist covering the story of Keenan’s kidnap when he was captured. They were opposites — an English public schoolboy and a working-class Irish socialist — but their conversations and flights of fancy helped them survive. Keenan held an Irish passport and was freed as a result of diplomatic efforts and relentless campaigning by his sisters. His captors did not tell him he was being released and he never had the chance to say goodbye to McCarthy.
An Evil Cradling was a bestseller and multiple prize-winner. It transformed Keenan into a literary lion, and he became writer-in-residence at Trinity College, Dublin. Subsequent books, Between Extremes, which he co-wrote with McCarthy about their Patagonian trip, and Turlough, were inspired by his incarceration, or, some might say, represented a coming to terms with the experience. He married a physiotherapist he met while in hospital, copying her phone number from the duty rosters, and they now have a young family.
It is others who refused to forget about Blind Flight. “From the point at which I’d read Brian’s book, I knew this project was something I wanted to be part of,” says Hart, “to pay respect to Brian’s integrity, his sense of hope, his sense of joy.”
“Blind Flight is both a prison drama and a love story,” says Furse, “involving the search for personal freedom in extraordinary conditions. Brian Keenan and John McCarthy’s incarceration in Lebanon can be seen as a physical metaphor for their inner emotional captivity, which, in the course of the film, they uncover and learn to transcend.”
Dick says: “We’ve come through a period where people thought, ‘Well, the Middle East hostage-taking stopped’, but in fact, now we are post 9/11, the difficulties with the Palestinian-Israeli conflict are continuing and the time is right again for this project . . . It’s a low-budget film, but we feel that it’s a film that’s really punching above its weight, because it’s a story that once people are engaged by it, they seem to be engaged by it body and soul.”
Keenan made a deliberate decision not to visit the set. Understandable you might think.
But it is not that he fears it would reawaken terrible memories; he simply thinks his presence might be unnerving for cast and crew. “It’s upsetting for people to think, Oh, God, here’s the ghost of Macbeth.” Modest and publicity-shy, Keenan insists he has every confidence in the film-makers. “It’s not my story,” he adds, leaving the listener to make of the comment what they will. Perhaps it was just a slip of the tongue, but there is a temptation to believe that here is a man who has learned the true value of life and is happy to assign his story to others — a generosity unlikely to be reciprocated in the shark-infested waters of the film world.
But ultimately Keenan would not be the man he is today were it not for the events that are being quietly recreated in a former haulage yard in Maryhill.
February 7, 2003
- Mag alert:
There is a two pages article about Joe with new pic in this week's Time Out London. We'll post it ASAP.
- From Empire Online:
As Johnny Vegas and Dustin Hoffman were cementing their relationship at last night's Empire awards, another batch of stars were putting in an appearance across town at Kevin Spacey's fund-raising bash for the Old Vic theatre. Hosted by Spacey and Sir Elton John, the concert was attended by a number of celebrities including Joseph Fiennes and Peter O'Toole, but the show was well and truly stolen by a striptease from one Courtney Love.
- From Hello Magazine:
London's Old Vic theatre is looking forward to a new era of prosperity after its new boss Kevin Spacey hosted a glittering fundraiser to kick off his tenure. The struggling venue's new artistic director welcomed a roll-call of stars from both Britain and the United States, for the benefit concert.Courtney Love gave a characteristically memorable performance when she sang a duet with Sir Elton John, dressed as Daffy Duck. She went on to shed the outfit and performed the end of the tune in just her underwear.
No doubt Virgin Boss Richard Branson, who was sitting in the audience, was not surprised by her antics, considering she had earlier been arrested on one of his jets. Also performing at the event were Sting, Craig David and Elvis Costello.
The musical line-up was complemented with entertainment from Joseph Fiennes, Peter O'Toole and Cate Blanchett. Quite a memorable evening by anyone's standards, but at £1,000 a ticket, the audience were expecting an all-star show.
The concert was expected to raise £500,000 which will go towards badly needed refurbishments. Kevin, who says he fell in love with the Old Vic after visiting it as a child, has also put in £100,000 of his own money.
He performed in the theatre, in The Iceman Cometh, in 1998 and has been involved in fundraising ever since. The two-time Oscar-winner says he will appear in two plays a year and will also direct for the theatre.
"It is something that I feel deeply about and have put over two years of thought into," he said. "Frankly, it is something that I am utterly overjoyed at having reached a decision upon."
February 6, 2003
- Yahoo Movies reports about Killing Me Softly
Video Release Date (2/5): March 25th, 2003 (going direct-to-video, skipping a theatrical release in the U.S.)Release Date Note: (1/16/03) This was long planned to be a theatrical release, but MGM has decided to just ship this off to video instead. The original target release was September, 2001 (it was pushed out of that month way before 9/11 happened), with the final theatrical release date (which was eventually canceled) being January 18th, 2002.
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