January 31, 2000
- People in the US: Watch out for SiL on STARZ on Valentine's Day (along with Onegin for the Ralph fans here)!
Check out the Click TV webpage to see when your cable STARZ will be showing the movies:
All you need do is enter your zip code and search for Fiennes to get your local time and channel.
- EATG background info:
The Independent (London), January 31, 2000, by Imre Karacs
RED ARMY AT THE GATES OF BERLIN AS STALIN STATUE RISES AGAIN ON GERMAN SOIL; CITY LIFE BERLINIT WAS Germany's biggest military defeat. About 150,000 of the country's soldiers died and another 90,000 were captured in the Battle of Stalingrad, the turning point of the Second World War. Now the carnage is to be played out again, but this time on German soil.
The makers of Enemy at the Gates, the most expensive film ever produced in Europe, searched for a year for a suitable location, and were eventually enticed by Babelsberg Studios to the birch forests that ring the German capital. The enemy arrived at Berlin's gate last week and shooting will begin this week. Among the terrified residents of Krampnitz, a village occupying the former borderlands between East Germany and West Berlin, Katyusha rockets will be landing every minute of the day in the coming months.
The locals can take it, for they have seen the Russians off before. Krampnitz and the surrounding countryside was a war zone for 40 years, dotted with Soviet missiles silos and bunkers. Driving up to the former Soviet barracks where Paramount and Mandalay Pictures are shooting their pounds 50m film, Hollywood's finest will pass a landscape that is not unlike the pictures coming out of Chechnya's capital, Grozny: decaying ruins of Soviet-era fortifications, fading red stars.
The producers built the set behind the forbidding walls of the barracks that dominate Krampnitz. Residents were sworn to secrecy in exchange for parts in the film. Still, word got out, and a few photographers managed to scale the walls while the guards had their backs turned. "We have been invaded," the film company's public relations officer says.
In this age of computer animation, only about 600 extras will be required to enact a battle of close to a million soldiers. For added authenticity, a new Stalin statue towers over this Potemkin Stalingrad, and because Krampnitz boasts no waterfront, scenes by the Volga will be shot by the river Oder, 50 miles away. The director, Jean-Jacques Annaud, is unlikely be worried about such niggling details. This is, after all, an expensive piece of entertainment and not a historical drama, nor even a war movie.
Enemy at the Gates is a love story. Jude Law plays Vassily, a Russian sharp-shooter groomed as a hero by his political officer Danilov, played by Joseph Fiennes. They both fall in love with buxom Red Army trooper Tanya, played by another English actor, Rachel Weisz.
Where do the Germans come in? The Wehrmacht is demoralised by Vassily's growing cult status among their enemy. So they send their meanest man, Koenig, a soldier played by Ed Harris, to rub Vassily out. Their duel is the film's climax.
This being a Hollywood movie, a happy ending is guaranteed. The Germans are confident that this time they will win.
January 30, 2000
- Calcom Calendars wants to know the following:
"Who would you like for 2001?
We are starting work on the 2001 calendar titles. If there is someone
or
something that we do not sell already that you would like us to add to
our
range let us know."
If you are like me and want to have a Joe calendar in 2001, please write here to suggest it to them: newideas@calcom.uk.com
Calcum
(And as I have not seen a Joe calendar anywhere so far, they would fill a market gap!)
January 26, 2000
- This week's Hello! mag (UK) has a Joe pic from a fashion show where he's sitting in the audience with Neil Morrissey and Rachel Weisz. Thank you to Tara for this mag alert.
- Joe is number one on a list of the "world's sexiest men", selected by the readers of German magazine "Joy". Thank you to Kerstin for pointing this out.
January 21, 2000
- RA opens today in the UK. No word yet on a US release date.
January 20, 2000
- Interview, "I'm Fiennes, Why Hurry?" appears in today's Evening Standard (UK).
- From the Press Association News File:
NO STAR GUESTS FOR FILM'S FIRST SCREENING
Michael Bristow, PA NewsA new film featuring some of Britain's top acting talent is not getting a premiere - because the stars are not able to attend.
Rancid Aluminium's first showing is being described only as its "first public screening" because the main cast will not be there.
Rhys Ifans, who played Hugh Grant's housemate in Notting Hill, and Joseph Fiennes, who took the lead role in Shakespeare in Love, are just two big names not able to get to the first showing in Cardiff tonight.
Tara Fitzgerald, Sadie Frost and Dani Behr, who all appear in the film, are also unavailable to attend.
A spokeswoman for Fiction Factory, the company which produced the film, said: "We are not having a premiere because the main cast are not attending."
Rhys Ifans, who received critical acclaim after appearing in his underpants in Notting Hill, is in Los Angeles, according to another Fiction Factory spokeswoman.
She said Tara Fitzgerald and Dani Behr were also in America.
Sadie Frost was due to attend the event, being held at Cardiff's UCI cinema, but pulled out earlier today.
The film is based on the book Rancid Aluminium, written by James Hawes, who also adapted his novel for screen.
It was shot in London, Wales and Poland and follows the life of Pete, who has a fling with his married secretary while his own relationship is on the rocks.
He is also having business problems and gets involved with a series of mysterious Russians.
The film's director, Ed Thomas, producer Mike Parker and a number of Welsh celebrities, including the Stereophonics, are due to attend the movie's first showing.
- Welsh premiere for Rancid movie
BBC Wales's Hugh Turnbull reports
Thursday, 20 January, 2000Notting Hill star Rhys Ifans' latest film - anarchic thriller Rancid Aluminium - has its world premiere in Cardiff on Thursday. The movie is an adaption of Cardiff writer James Hawes' best-selling novel and has been made in Wales by an all-Welsh production team. The film's makers are hoping it will be a hit on the screen as well as the page.
With a star-studded cast - including Joseph Fiennes, Tara Fitzgerald and Steven Berkoff - and led by Wales's hottest cinema export Rhys Ifans, it could become a cult classic along with the novel. The film is also the directorial debut of Ed Thomas, who wrote the Welsh family drama House of America, which picked up two awards at the Stockholm Film Festival in 1997. "It has a Welsh crew, Rhys is Welsh and we shot a lot of it in or around Cardiff. I think it counts as a Welsh film because of its imagination and daftness," he said.
In the movie, Ifans dons a London accent to play a failing businessman whose marriage is on the rocks while he is infatuated with his secretary. Only his best friend, played by Joseph Fiennes, can save the day - with a little help from the Russian mafia. It is Rhys Ifans' first big film since he starred alongside Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts in Notting Hill. In complete contrast, Rancid Aluminium is an anarchic thriller, involving the Russian mafia, and is unlikely to have quite the same mass appeal.
Thursday's premiere will be at the UCI in Cardiff, and Rancid Aluminium goes on release across the UK on Friday.
January 18, 2000
Work has begun on EATG:
The Sunday Herald, January 16, 2000 Stalingrad returns to haunt Germany's heart.
Bill Allen reports from Berlin.THEY began building Stalingrad in Berlin this week - the epic reconstruction of a time and a place that cost Germany the Second World War and that, to this day, leaves a scar that has never healed. Nearly 60 years after the German Sixth Army was destroyed in the turning point of the conflict it is a battle that is never far from the collective national conscience.
So sensitive is the issue that the Bundeswehr, the modern day army, has refused the film makers creating the doomed city on the Volga in the new German capital any technical assistance whatsoever. Usually for hire to movie moguls, the Bundeswehr has offered only "historical" help to the producers making what will be the most expensive film ever made in Europe. Entitled Enemy at the Gates, it stars Ed Harris, Jude Law and Joseph Fiennes.
"We have no time or manpower to assist except with historical information," said a Bundeswehr spokesman, blaming Kosovo, manpower shortages and domestic war games for the inability to provide soldiers as extras and pioneers as builders for the mammoth sets. It is not surprising. Stalingrad, the prize city which Hitler coveted so much, and which was to become the beginning of the end of his Third Reich, is still a contentious issue for both countries.
It was only last year that the first memorial to fallen Germans was erected in the city now called Volgograd and vast numbers of corpses remain stacked in primitive charnel houses awaiting burial at a time when wounds are not so raw. Six decades would seem long enough to most people, but not to the Russians, and many Germans, for that matter.
The Wehrmacht, which viewed its troops as crusaders against Asiatic hordes, lost a full quarter of all its equipment in the slaughter, along with a quarter of a million men. Forbidden to surrender the Sixth Army struggled on in the final weeks of January 1943 eating raw horseflesh, with no medicine for wounds and no anaesthetic for surgery.
Only 5000 soldiers out of a captured 110,000 ever returned to Germany. Russia, which lost 22 million people in the Great Patriotic War has been slow to forgive. That is why the producers who began building a replica of Stalingrad at the famed Babelsberg-Potsdam studios this week hope the movie will also serve, in some small measure, as a tribute to the heroism of both sides and the memory of the dead. "Yes, I hope that Enemy at the Gates will be a healing process as well as an entertaining film," said Markus Bensch, locations manager.
"It was a place of intense suffering that left deep wounds on the collective soul of the combatants and the two nations in general. We aim to honour the suffering of all sides." Jean-Jacques Arnaud, award winning director of the medieval sleuth-movie The Name of the Rose is directing the picture which is being produced by Peter Strauss, creator of the Liza Minnelli hit Cabaret.
In order to humanise what was incredibly inhuman - a battle fought in rubble, often hand-to-hand in temperatures well below freezing - Arnaud is concentrating on a sniper duel between one German and one Russian soldier. A ruined cement works at the edge of the studio complex - the place where Marlene Dietrich made The Blue Angel in the 1930's - will become the Red October Tractor Plant which was the scene of some of the heaviest fighting of the real battle.
All around it are going up plaster and balsawood models of half-ruined houses and shops, smashed streets and broken tanks.
Another reason why Babelsberg was chosen over many other European locations, including Britain, was the labyrinth of Russian army bunkers that abound on the site. After the war it was in East Germany and the Russians staged annual manoeuvres on much of the land bordering the studio site.
Five hundred workers began constructing the ruins this week. Thousands of students and would-be Hollywood stars have signed up for a few pounds per day as extras when filming begins in the spring. The picture, which has a budget of close to £55million and which will probably accelerate to £70m once filming starts, is relying on the expertise of old soldiers from both sides to help them make it as authentic as possible.
In the words of Arnaud: "I want to make it so authentic you will feel as if you were there."
Klaus Henkel-Schmidt, captured at Stalingrad as a 19-year-old and one of the lucky few ever to make it back home, has advised technical staff on trenches, terrain and the very atmosphere of what that particular hell was really like. He said: "Of course you can never know what it was really like - the men with no legs whose blood froze as soon as they were hit; the army of lice that left a dead body to find warmth and nourishment on a living one.
"The fires at night, the screaming shells and the howling dogs that jumped into the Volga to try to swim for the eastern bank.
"It is a strange and exclusive brotherhood I come from. We were all young lads doing our duty and so was Ivan. I don't know that attitudes will change much on either side but if a little bit of understanding about what we went through comes out of this, perhaps it won't have all been in vain "
Shooting of the battle that broke the Third Reich is about to start.
January 17, 2000
- James Hawes will be signing copies of his novel, Rancid Aluminium, at Border's Book Shop, Oxford Street, London on January 19th at 6pm.
- The cast of RA will be interviewed on "Sky News Showbiz Weekly" (UK) on January 23rd.
- The UK film site Popcorn has more RA pics on-line.
January 14, 2000
- Incase you haven't already heard, we have received another award from the Star Pages. Once again, a big thank you to everyone for the support and encouragement.
January 12, 2000
- Article about the Fiennes family in Italian Amica magazine, January 2000 issue.
January 10, 2000
- New interview in the Telegraph, issue 1690 (UK). Click here to go to their website or you can find it on our Articles page.
January 9, 2000
- No Ordinary Joe has been awarded a star by Star Pages for "high standard of design and exceptional
content." Aw, shucks! Actually we received it because YOU voted for us.
Thank you! It means much.
From the 'Just for Fun' Department:
- German Elle "Annual Horoscope 2000"
"Pisces: Your dream guy is showing the real romantic. But also his eroticism and his inner fire which only a woman like you can light. Prominent examples: Keanu Reeves or Joseph Fiennes."
January 5, 2000
RA is finally showing some signs of life in the entertainment press. No new info but there are some new, albeit tiny, pictures on the Screen Cinemas site.
January 4, 2000
- Article in German newspaper, Stuttgarter Zeitung. Beate is in the process of translating into English but, in the mean time, we have posted the article in the original language for those of you who speak German.
- An interview with JF (regarding Rancid Aluminium, presumably) appears in the 2/00 issue of Total Film (UK).
- Our site has been added to the Star Pages Website (a site dedicated to indexing fan pages). You can vote for our site by clicking on the button at the bottom of our Home page. In two days we've already jumped to #5 of 11 listed JF sites. We didn't create this site to win popularity contests but it is gratifying to receive so many votes. Thanks guys!
January 2, 2000
- Joe appears in the 12/31/99 issue of The Telegraph (UK).
- Folks in the US- don't throw out the Sunday paper yet! The following appeares in the Parade supplement:
Q. It seems that my favorite British actor, Ralph Fiennes has other talented siblings besides brother Joseph, of SiL . Can you tell me about them?A. In addition to actors Ralph, 37, and Joseph, 29, there is Martha, 35, who directed Ralph's new film, Onegin, a tragic Russian love story that earned her Best Director honors at the Tokyo International Film Festival; Sophie, 32, a documentary filmmaker; Joseph's twin brother, Jacob, a gamekeeper; Magnus, a composer who scored Onegin, and an adopted brother Michael Emery, an archeologist. Their father, Mark is a photographer. But the remarkable Fiennes "kids" say they owe their creativity to their mother, Jini, who died of breast cancer in 1993 at 55. "She supported our individuality and encouraged our self-expression," says Martha. What's more, while raising seven children, Jini found time to write seven books under her maiden name, Jennifer Lash. Her last novel, Blood Ties, was published posthumously.
January 1, 2000
Joe appears in the 01/07/00 issue of Entertainment Weekly.
Abbreviations
