PROFILES


ral talent and something unique… So now Abedallah had really grown up and maybe he was over- confident and was almost too much of an actor. Now I had to say, ‘Forget Tel Aviv, forget the movies you’ve been in, you’re now a kid in a refugee camp in 1982, this is you now.’ For me, he can be a world-cali-


Zaytoun Eran Riklis Zaytoun


Eran Riklis adds to what he calls his ‘Middle East Cycle’ (after The Syr- ian Bride and Lemon Tree) with Zaytoun, the story of an unlikely road trip undertaken by an Israeli fighter pilot (Stephen Dorff) and a Palestinian boy (Abedallah El Akel). The film plays in Special Presenta- tions today; Pathé handles sales. Up next for Riklis will be


another Middle Eastern story, Dancing Arabs, plus a bigger- budget Europe-set thriller.


What did you connect with in this story? You have these horrible situations which are part of everyday life in the Middle East, and sometimes you can go down to eye level and forget about political conceptions and prejudice, bad history and blood, and bring it into something simple, accessible and under- standable. It’s a glimpse behind the headlines, into the lives of people.


Eran Riklis


What drew you to Stephen Dorff? With Stephen, there was some- thing about his physique and his type, and I thought, ‘I know a lot of pilots like that.’ Stephen’s talent and ambition are to be very pre- cise. We worked a lot on giving this character a world, even if you don’t see it, you feel it. I love every moment he’s on screen, it’s a won- derful performance.


What about casting the young boy? I found him a few years ago on a short film; he was about 10 years old then. I thought he had a natu-


Andrew Adamson Mr Pip


Andrew Adamson, whose credits include The Chronicles Of Narnia and Shrek, changes gears for an adaptation of the acclaimed Lloyd Jones novel, Mister Pip. Set on the island of Bougainville in Papua New Guinea during a civil war in the 1990s, the film follows Matilda (Xzannjah Matsi) as she finds escape in Charles Dickens’ novel, Great Expectations. Focus Features International is


handling international sales with UTA representing US.


You’ve adapted books to film before. Was this process any different? It was difficult on a few levels. First of all, it’s subtly deeper than it seems on first read. Lloyd’s a very clever writer. He writes in this prose that you so enjoy reading that you don’t often realise how much he’s leaping around in real- ity and time and monologue and exterior thought. It was only as I started breaking


it down that I realised it wasn’t such a straightforward cinematic adaptation as it seemed on the first read.


Mr Pip


Why was it important to actually shoot the film in Bougainville? For a while I thought the easy way to do this would be to set up an area in northern Australia and build the village there. But the more I looked into the political situation, which I was superficially aware of but not deeply aware of, the more I realised how important the story was to Bougainville. At one stage we were in a class-


room looking for kids; they were acting up and the teacher started getting angry with them. She said, ‘You kids need to show this man


n 30 Screen International at Toronto September 9, 2012


what you can do because if not, he’s going to cast a girl from the Solomon Islands and then some- body else will be telling our story. And this is our story and we need to tell our story.’ It got to the point where there had to be a really good reason not to make it there.


Newcomer Xzannjah Matsi stars alongside veteran actor Hugh Laurie. What was the casting process like and how did the actors interact? It was a fairly exhaustive casting process. [Casting director] Nikki


Andrew Adamson


Barrett was literally backpacking around the South Pacific for months. When she came upon Xzannjah... there was just some- thing about her. I looked at her on tape and she was smart, confident and imaginative. And Hugh saw within her, I think, a real kindred spirit. The first time I put them together and rehearsed a scene, they were sizing each other up and were fascinated by each other. It was at that point I knew the core element, that core relationship, would actually really work. Regan Reid


bre star. Maybe it’s not for me to say but I feel there’s not one sec- ond in the film where you feel he is contrived or mechanical.


Without giving away the ending, was this always the way you knew the film had to end? It’s a bittersweet ending. It’s that kind of story — you can go in many directions. But the reality is not easy. It certainly wasn’t easy in 1982 and it’s not easy today. I don’t like big messages I like


subtle messages… I present the stories, the characters, the situa- tions, but you as an audience make a decision with where you want to go. At the end of the day, it’s about putting all those issues aside and staying with two people. Wendy Mitchell


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