A walk on the Wilder side

YOU will have seen it in countless Hollywood movies, the scene in which a character is asked to do something outrageous which he does not wish to do. The scene might end, let's say, with a man categorically refusing to dress up as his friend's grandmother; fast cut to the same man in lipstick, fur coat and a very large hat.

Well, when Harrison Ford and producer Scott Rubin first approached director Sydney Pollack with their idea for a new version of Billy Wilder's romantic comedy, Sabrina, Pollack's first reaction was to turn it down as a "silly idea" - fade out. Fade in to; an enthusiastic Pollack putting a 1990s spin on a 1950s fairy tale.

"I get really tempted by love stories," says Pollack by way of explaining his volte face, "and they're really hard to do because this is not a great time to do a love story. One of the other things that tempted me about Sabrina was that it was a love story where the lovers were coming from opposite ends of the world."

Those familiar with Wilder's 1954 movie will recall that it is the story of Sabrina Fairchild, a chauffeur's daughter (played by Audrey Hepburn) who is packed off to a cookery school in Paris to get over her long held crush on David (William Holden), the younger son of the wealthy family her father serves. When she comes back, she has been transformed from an ugly duckling into a supremely elegant swan, and the newlyengaged Holden, to the consternation of his family, can't keep his eyes off her. Enter Humphrey Bogart as David's older brother Linus, a hard nosed businessman who courts Hepburn with the aim of getting her safely out of the way and packed off back to Paris.

It was a sweet tale (or as sweet as the essentially cynical Wilder would allow) which was marred only by the fact that Bogart was 36 years older than Hepburn, and he looked every minute of it. Once he had agreed to the remake, with Harrison Ford as Linus, Pollack's first task was to run Wilder's film in a screening room.

"I suddenly realised that I had never seen the movie. I just thought I had because I'd seen so many production stills of Hepburn in those wonderful 1950s outfits." In fact, one of the few things that rankles with the immensely good humoured Pollack is that most of today's audiences will be equally unfamiliar with the original, but that critics and journalists "who are going to tell those people how to feel about it, will have seen Wilder's movie".

Pollack cheerfully admits to "stealing" the best scenes from Wilder but he has made some radical departures. For example, Sabrina's thwarted suicide attempt early in the first version has been excised from the remake.

"Something has happened to the world in the past 40 years," Pollack says. "Too many kids have tried it, too many kids have done it; teenage suicide is a big deal. We laugh about the intensity of feeling that teenagers have, but it's not a joke.

For all that, Pollack insists that he has tried to give Sabrina a "harder contemporary edge". His take on the story seems more generously humane than Wilder's. The women in Pollack's film are more powerful, much less ridiculous, than in the original. David's fiancee, for instance, was merely a spoilt heiress in 1964; in the modernisation she is still an heiress but she is also a hard working paediatrician. The same goes for Sabrina herself; instead of taking cookery classes in Paris, she takes a job as a photographic assistant on French Vogue.

"I've never made a movie in which the stronger character was not the woman," says Pollack. "Don't ask me what that means I don't even want to think about it.

The love stories I make are usually about men whose lives are radically changed by strong, wise women on some level, whether it's Meryl Streep [in Out of Africa] or Barbra Streisand [in The Way We Were]. I sure as hell started to do it again here because Sabrina really challenges Linus, she really startles hint.

"I always feel that when I go to Europe I grow in some way and I can't explain why. It has to do with what I see, with what I experience, what is so radically different from America. So I wanted very much for Sabrina's trip to Paris to change her brain, and not Just her hair cut and her clothes. I kept trying to find her a job that would teach her to see, so I gravitated to photography. It teaches you to become aware of the light and being aware of the light you start to see people and patterns. So she is able to understand something about Linus, and it works both ways, in that she finds a surprising vulnerability about this ogre of a guy that he doesn't even know he has. But all this is based on strong women, and I don't mean muscles, I mean wise."

In casting the role of Sabrina, Pollack knew he would never find another Audrey Hepburn. "She was a one off. I don't even know if she was a good actress or not, it doesn't matter; she had a total charisma." He finally settled on the English actress, Julia Ormond, best known for her roles in Legends Of The Fall and First Knight.

"Hepburn had a transparent quality; Julia is much more solid and she's a wonderful actress. In the 1950s, audiences were prepared to take much more on trust, Bogey takes Hepburn for a sail ride and suddenly she loves him. These days you have to play the development of that relationship and Julia can do that."

The William Holden role was to have gone to Tom Cruise, but when Cruise proved unavailable, Pollack eventually chose Greg Kinnear, a popular chat show host on American television who proves himself a charming and likeable performer. The balance between Ford and Kinnear is a definite improvement on the original, and Pollack admits that American reviewers have been evenly split between those who attacked him for daring to remake Wilder and those who loved the new version.

Pollack's voice drops to little more than a whisper: "There were even a couple of guys who said, `Dare we say this, but your version's better'."