April 27, 2000
Screen Daily
Liliana Cavani to direct Fine Line's Ripley's Game
by Mike Goodridge in LA

Liliana Cavani, the Italian director behind The Night Porter who hasn’t made a film since 1993, has boarded Fine Line Features’ Ripley’s Game - an adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s classic novel which follows Tom Ripley 25 years after the events portrayed in The Talented Mr Ripley.

Cavani is supervising a script rewrite and has agreed to direct the movie which is being overseen by Fine Line’s London-based senior vice president of European production Ileen Maisel.

Maisel had originally set the project up at Fine Line two years ago through her Baby Productions with Mike Newell and Alan Greenspan of Dogstar Films attached as executive producers. Rupert Everett was attached to star as Jonathan, a terminally ill picture-framer, hired by Ripley to carry out some killings.

Cavani is best known for her controversial 1974 movie The Night Porter which portrayed a contemporary reunion between a former Nazi commandant (Dirk Bogarde) and the woman (Charlotte Rampling) he raped in a concentration camp. Although she followed it up with two similarly charged looks at Nazism - Beyond Good And Evil (1977) and Berlin Interior (1978) - she made fewer and fewer films. In 1989, she made Francesco about the life of St Francis Of Assissi starring Mickey Rourke and in 1993 the Italian TV movie Where Are You? I’m Here but has otherwise concentrated on her stage work.

When Fine Line announced the project at Cannes two years ago, there was speculation that the company would race Miramax Films, itself in pre-production on The Talented Mr Ripley, to theatres. However Fine Line’s president Mark Ordesky said that “it’s a sequel book and was always envisaged as a sequel film.”

“We’re looking to put it together as a European co-production since it’s set in France and Germany, the director is Italian and all the producers are Italian nationals,” said Ordesky.

Fine Line, which starts production on its $11m comedy Sleeping Dictionary in Malaysia on May 1, is expanding its overseas production activities. Julianne Moore is scheduled to star as Amelia Earhardt in the movie of Jane Mendelsohn’s fictionalised biography I Was Amelia Earhardt which Fred Schepisi is attached to direct on locations in Australia, while Fine Line UK has also put on the fast development track Dagenham Coup, a thriller set in London in the early 60s and telling the true story of how a team of twenty-somethings conspired to win a fortune on the dog races. Script is by John Harding, with Betsan Evans attached to direct.