Shooting gets underway in Dublin next Monday week on the comedy movie, Shiney's Head, an Irish-Canadian co-production which will star Dan Aykroyd, Brenda Blethyn and Robbie Coltrane. "It's a madcap caper movie," says Tristan Lynch, who is producing the film with Canadian Scott Kennedy. The screenplay is by an Irish writer, Tony Philpott, and it will be directed by David Caffrey, the Irish film-maker who made Divorcing Jack and the television series, Aristocrats.
The film is set around bizarre events at a Dublin medical institute where the head is played by Aykroyd and the Coltrane character works as a porter. It's Lynch's second film with Blethyn after Night Train, and she plays the porter's wife. The medium-budget film will be shot entirely in Dublin and postproduction will follow in Vancouver.
Lynch adds that casting is already underway on Cape Random, an eight-part TV series he is making about Irish emigrants to Newfoundland in the 1830s.
Little Bird, the production company behind films such as Into the West and Ordinary Decent Criminal - and the TV series Relative Strangers, The Hanging Gale and The Irish RM - will produce the film of Bridget Jones' Diary with the UK company, Working Title. The bestseller by Helen Fielding has been adapted for the screen by Richard Curtis - who scripted Working Title's big hits, Four Weddings and a Funeral and Notting Hill - along with Andrew Davies and Fielding herself. The film starts shooting in London in mid-May under first-time feature director Sharon Maguire.
After a long casting quest and any number of rumoured choices (chiefly Kate Winslet, Cate Blanchett, Helena Bonham Carter and Emily Watson) the role of Bridget Jones has gone to the Texan actress, Renee Zellweger, who's best known for co-starring with Tom Cruise in Jerry Maguire and Meryl Streep in One True Thing. Zellweger will next be seen with her off-screen partner Jim Carrey in the summer comedy, Me, Myself and Irene, and with Morgan Freeman and Chris Rock in Neil LaBute's Nurse Betty.
Meanwhile, Little Bird begins filming the two-part television drama Dirty Tricks on April 10th. Adapted by Nigel Williams from the novel by Michael Dibden, it will star Martin Clunes and be directed by Paul Seed. And Little Bird is now in pre-production on the new Werner Herzog movie, Invincible, which starts shooting in Lithuania on March 20th. An epic set in 1930s Germany, it will star Tim Roth.
Having made his directing debut with the harrowing incest drama The War Zone, Tim Roth is about to tackle the ultimate dysfunctional family drama - King Lear. Harold Pinter is adapting the Shakespeare play for Roth's proposed feature film. Roth insists that it will not be a traditional staging of the play. "This is a very hefty piece to say the least," he says, "and I'm not interested in a bunch of people standing around a castle talking. What Harold Pinter will do is rearrange, cut and then turn it from a stage piece into cinema."
The spirited, dark US college comedy, Election, was the surprise winner of the Writers' Guild of America (WGA) award for best adapted screenplay this week. The award went to Alexander Payne, who also directed the film, and Jim Taylor. The WGA awards are always strong indicators of the Oscar screenplay awards which follow. The WGA award for best original screenplay went to Alan Ball for American Beauty, which must give him the edge over Charlie Kaufman's screenplay for Being John Malkovich in what is widely regarded as a two-horse race for the best original screenplay Oscar.
The Irish short film, In Loving Memory, has received the audience award, the Prix de Publique, at the prestigious Cleremont-Ferrand short film festival in France. The film, which will be seen in the Debut series on RTE, is described as "an unusual love story". Written and directed by Audrey O'Reilly and produced by Barry Dignam, it will be screened in the Short Cuts programme at next month's Dublin Film Festival.
Bruce Willis is returning to television as a guest star on three episodes of Friends. Willis, who will donate his salary to charity, plays Paul Stevens, described as an attractive widower and the father of the new girlfriend of the David Schwimmer character, Ross. Willis was persuaded to do it by Friends actor Matthew Perry, his co-star in the current US hit film The Whole Nine Yards.