Any film boasting underage sex, Nazis and literary credentials as impeccable as the long-awaited adaptation of Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader is never going to struggle for attention.
However, with a who’s who of Hollywood favourites lined up to bring the bestselling German novel to the screen, Anthony Minghella, the co-producer, is taking no chances.
Nicole Kidman and Ralph Fiennes, who starred for Minghella in Cold Mountain and The English Patient respectively, will head the cast.
The director is Stephen Daldry, and Sir David Hare, the playwright, has adapted the screenplay .
The last time they worked together, adapting Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer-prizewinning novel The Hours, they were both Oscar-nominated and Kidman won the Best Actress Oscar for her portrayal of Virginia Woolf.
Two of the industry’s most enduring powerbrokers, Sydney Pollack and Harvey Weinstein, are co-producers, and the book, which tells the story of a young boy’s affair with an older woman who, he later discovers, has concealed both a terrible war crime and illiteracy, was a publishing phenomenon around the world.
If there is such a thing as an Oscar contender before filming begins, The Reader is probably it.
However, as William Goldman, the star screenwriter of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and All The Presidents’ Men,famously said, there is only one rule in the movie business: “Nobody knows anything.”
Nick James, the editor of Sight and Sound magazine, said: “This is an impressive package of talent that ought to deliver something marvellous but you can’t ever say in advance what a film is going to be like. This is a make-or-break moment for Stephen Daldry because it’s been a long time since [his breakthrough film] Billy Elliot. It’s also been a little while since Nicole Kidman pulled off a major role.
“This has all the hallmarks of a prestige movie, the sort of film that the Weinsteins pioneered when they were at Miramax. Some of them worked and some of them didn’t but they do have a consistent track record.”
Shooting is due to begin next month, in and around Berlin.
Set in post-war Germany, The Reader is the story of Michael Berg, who, aged 15 , is drawn into an intoxicating affair with Hanna Schmitz, an enigmatic woman more than twice his age.
Their meetings become a ritual of reading aloud, taking showers and making love. She is secretive about her past and, when she disappears one day, he expects never to see her again. Years later, as a law student, he attends a Nazi war crimes trial.
Among the former concentration camp guards accused of allowing prisoners to burn in a locked church during a bombing raid is his former lover.
When the novel came out ten years ago, Ruth Rendell described it as “sensitive, daring, deeply moving”, while A. S. Byatt called it “a beautifully constructed fable”.
Minghella was so captivated by the book, he snapped up the rights to it as soon as he read it. He had been expected to direct the adaptation himself.
However, Daldry, having been equally mesmerised, asked whether he could. He said: “He [Anthony] very graciously agreed to be my producer.”
Daldry made his name as a stage director with the Royal Court Theatre before making Billy Elliot. He told The Times yesterday that he considers The Reader “one of the great postwar German novels”.
He said: “Its exploration of forgiveness, guilt and so-called German trauma I find heartbreaking. The subject is postwar Germany, not the Holocaust, although that comes into the book. Nor is it about underage sex. It is about first love. It isn’t that explicit.”
Kidman will portray Hanna at several different stages in her life and is expected to undergo extensive make-up, just as she did for The Hours, in which she was almost unrecognisable, disguised by a dowdy wig and a prosthetic nose that took hours to apply. Fiennes will play the older Michael, while a young German actor, who is yet to be announced, has been cast as the boy.
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