Ready for Lughnasa

Principal casting for Pat O'Connor's film of Brian Friel's Dancing At Lughnasa is now complete. Joining two-time Oscar-winner Meryl Streep in the cast are Brid Brennan, recreating the role of Agnes, which won her a Tony award on Broadway; as Agnes, Kathy Burke, winner of the best actress award at Cannes this year for Nil By Mouth; Catherine McCormack, from Braveheart, as Christine; and as Rose, Sophie Thompson from Emma and Four Weddings And A Funeral. The male leads will be played by Michael Gambon and Twin Town star Rhys Ifans. The screenplay is by Frank McGuinness, and the lighting cameraman is Kenneth McMillan, who lit Pat O'Connor's Circle of Friends. The producer is Noel Pearson, who already has sold the US distribution rights on the film to Sony Picture Classics. The movie starts shooting on Monday week, August 18th.

THE writer and director John Milius, who made the landmark 1978 surfing buddy movie, Big Wednesday, has been defending his 1984 film, Red Dawn, a Reaganite picture of Russians and Cubans invading Middle America. He told the Los Angeles magazine, Buzz, that he was pleased that right-wing US militia groups were fans of Red Dawn.

"I think it's good for the government to know there's a militia out there," he said. How did he feel about the convicted Oklahoma City bomber, Timothy McVeigh? "He's a nut - Timothy McVeigh would be a nut anywhere."

Asked then about McVeigh's militia tendencies, he replied: "I think they - the government - are partially responsible for Timothy McVeigh. The ATF bears a lot of blame - and the FBI. They murdered all those people at Waco and nobody has been incarcerated. It doesn't matter whether they are good people or bad people. They did it. The government went in like storm troopers and killed those people and violated their rights and violated the sanctity of our constitution. And they're going to get a response to that. I don't agree with Timothy McVeigh's response, but I think they share part of the blame. Oklahoma City is their bomb as well as his."

An ardent supporter of the pro-guns lobby in the US, Milius told Buzz he sometimes uses his guns to shoot videos sent to him for his consideration as an Academy Awards voter. "I shot Enchanted April, and I shot The Madness of King George," he said. "I would shoot the people who made them if they were in front of me. How dare they take two hours of my life for nothing except to do a little costume drama - English prissiness."

As for this year's Oscar-winner, The English Patient? "I hated it," Milius said. "I thought it was just the most self-indulgent, overwrought, pretentious, neo-homosexual trash."

President Robinson will be the guest of honour at the last of the summer's Meeting House Square open-air screenings in Dublin's Temple Bar. On Friday, August 29th, she will be joining the audience to watch the exploits of a fictional US president whose plane is hijacked by terrorists in Air Force One, the new Wolfgang Petersen movie which stars Harrison Ford (as the president), Gary Oldman and Glenn Close.

This premiere is a special benefit screening for the Irish Film Archive and tickets cost £10 each. To book, or for further information, call the IFC on (01) 679-3477.

THE mercurial French director, Leos Carax, has started work on his first feature since Les Amants Du Pont Neuf, his 1991 film which became notorious for its soaring budget over the course of a vastly extended shoot. The new Carax picture is Pola X which stars Catherine Deneuve, Guillaume Depardieu and Katerina Golubeva, and it started shooting in France on Monday. No further information is available at this stage.

David Thewlis, from Naked, plays the leading role in Divorcing Jack, the first feature from the young Irish director, David Caffrey, which shoots this month in Belfast. Adapted by Colin Bateman from his novel of the same name, the movie features Thewlis as Jack, a journalist who gets caught up in a political minefield after he has an adulterous liaison with a young student; when the student is murdered, Jack becomes the prime suspect. Robert Cooper is producing the movie.

THE lively 1997 edition of The Cork Review is devoted to film and edited by Kieran O'Connor, who contributes several articles to the collection, including Milk Baths And Monkey Suits, an amusing trawl through the chequered history of the Cork Film Festival, and Marlon Brando And The Film That Never Was, a short obituary on the ill-fated Divine Rapture.

The publication includes an interview with the Cork-born actress, Fiona Shaw; an expletive-littered extract from the first draft of a screenplay by Enda Walsh; a feature on the role of the Cork art-house, the Kino, in the age of the multiplex; an article on Broken Harvest and the Civil War, and much more. The Cork Review is available at £3.95 from bookstores and galleries across the country.

For his third outing as a director, Tim Robbins is scripting The Cradle Will Rock, dealing with the staging of the 1937 musical of the same name. Meanwhile, John Turturro's second film as a director (after Mac) is Illuminata. Described as "an erotic farce", it features Susan Sarandon, Christopher Walken, Ben Gazzara and Turturro himself.

More actors turning director: Tony Goldwyn with The Blouse Man, starring Diane Lane, Viggo Mortensen and Anna Paquin; Bonnie Hunt with the romantic drama, Dis- tance Calls; and Adrian Pasdar with a film noir titled Cement.

Filming in England: Jim Broadbent, Eddie Izzard, Eileen Atkins, John Wood and the aforementioned Fiona Shaw have joined the cast of Jeremiah Chechik's movie of The Avengers, now shooting in London with Ralph Fiennes as John Steed, Uma Thurman as Emma Peel and Sean Connery as the villain.

Filming has finished in Manchester on the new Jimmy McGovern screenplay, Heart, directed by Charles McDougall. Dealing with a series of obsessive relationships triggered by a man's heart transplant, it stars Christopher Eccleston, Saskia Reeves, Kate Hardie and Rhys Ifans.

Athlete Linford Christie plays himself in his movie debut, Us Begins With You, now shooting in London with ER star Anthony Edwards (as an American sports therapist in Britain), Charles Dance, Jenny Seagrove and Tom Conti. Will Patterson directs. Morgan Freeman and Pernilla August have joined Ewan McGregor and Liam Neeson in the cast of the super-secretive Star Wars prequel filming at Leavesden Studios outside London. The ubiquitous McGregor's latest credit is providing the voice of a steward in the new Virgin Atlantic in-flight safety video. Susannah York and Leslie Philips provide the other voices in the animated video.

Perish the thought: Get ready for the movie of The Little House On The Prairie, the Laura Ingalls Wilder novel which spawned one of the most saccharine series in television history. Horton Foote, an Oscar-winner for his screenplay of To Kill A Mockingbird, is adapting the novel for the screen, and Ed Friendly, who produced the TV series, will be executive producer on the movie. Pass the sick bag, Ed.