February 11, 2004
- New Joe film:
Mail on Sunday (London)
February 1, 2004
By Brian PendreighThe Hollywood giants who could be outshone by a band of pygmies
An epic film about to be shot in Scotland will star a pair of big-screen giants. But Joseph Fiennes and Kristin Scott Thomas could find themselves upstaged by a couple of pygmies. The tribesmen will play opposite the movie stars in Man to Man, costing Pounds 10 million to film in South Africa, Edinburgh and at various stately homes in the Borders.
In the film, Fiennes plays a 19th-century anthropologist who captures the pygmies in the Congo and brings them back to his Scottish estate to study them in the belief they may be the 'missing link' in human evolution. While others are convinced they are little more than animals, he realises they are just as human as anyone else and develops a particularly close relationship with the female.
The film, which starts shooting in South Africa this month, will later relocate to Scotland for seven weeks of filming in Edinburgh and at Duns Castle, Manderston House and Sir Walter Scott's former home, Abbotsford in the Borders.
Fiennes, star of the Oscar-winning movie Shakespeare in Love, plays opposite Scott Thomas, who appeared with his brother Ralph in The English Patient, which won five Oscars in 1997. The film will also star Edinburghborn actor Iain Glen, who co-starred with Nicole Kidman in the controversial play The Blue Room, and Flora Montgomery, the Irish star of Roddy Doyle's When Brendan Met Trudy.
Western society became fascinated by pygmies when European explorers travelled into the heart of the African continent for the first time in the 19th century. Pygmies turn up fairly regularly in jungle adventure stories and Tarzan had the odd encounter with them but, otherwise, they have been largely ignored by Hollywood. Man to Man is set to change all that.
William Boyd, whose novels have combined critical acclaim with huge commercial success, worked on the script with French director Regis Wargnier. Boyd, whose screenwriting credits include Chaplin, was born of Scottish parents in Ghana. He attended Gordonstoun boarding school, studied English and philosophy at Glasgow University and has used African and Scottish elements in his stories.
Wargnier has been nurturing Man to Man for several years, after making Indochine, which starred Catherine Deneuve as a colonial landowner and won the Oscar for best foreignlanguage film, and East-West, a drama about the fate of Russian exiles returning after the Revolution. He is undoubtedly one of France's top film directors and Man to Man is his first film in English. He said: 'I want to make films that will last.' While considering the big philosophical question, he is also determined that Man to Man should work as an adventure story.
A European production crew is now in South Africa, gearing up for the first leg of filming, while arrangements are finalised for the Scottish leg after Easter.
