A guest at the recent Galway Film Fleadh, Mexican director Luis Mandoki extended his visit to tour around Ireland in preparation for his next project, The Winged Boy, which is now set to shoot here and in Britain next spring.
Described as a family film with a slice of magic realism, the film deals with a young boy living in an Irish village where he grows wings and starts to fly. The Winged Boy is based on an unpublished story written by Mary Hayley Bell, widow of the late John Mills, and the screenplay was co-written by her grandson Crispian Mills, singer and guitarist with Kula Shaker, and son of Hayley.
Mandoki's latest movie, Innocent Voices, dealing with boy conscripts during the civil war in 1980s El Salvador, opens here early next year. His Hollywood movies include White Palace, Angel Eyes, Message in a Bottle and When a Man Loves a Woman.
Prestige project
Director Christopher Nolan reunites with his Batman Begins star Christian Bale for The Prestige, which will co-star Hugh Jackman and is due to start shooting in January. The story, which begins in 1878, features Bale and Jackman as magicians whose intense rivalry turns both men into murderers.
The director's brother, Memento screenwriter Jonathan Nolan, has written the adaptation based on Christopher Priest's novel.
Winners at Stranger fest
The principal prize at last weekend's Stranger Than Fiction festival at the Irish Film Institute in Dublin went to Idir Dhá Shaol, John Mallon's documentary charting the hard times of a Connemara man who emigrated to London in the 1950s. The winner of the audience award was Return to Tsunami, in which Late Late Show producer Bill Malone revisits Khao Lak three months after he escaped death there. The award for best Irish-language documentary was given to Neasa Ní Chianáin for Saighdiúiri Beaga Gaelach, which observes small Gaeltacht schools accommodating children from diverse backgrounds.
Myers to shoot the Moon
Last seen in The Cat in the Hat, which must rank as the nadir in his career, Mike Myers is set to play Keith Moon, the colourful and volatile drummer with The Who who died in 1978 at the age of 32. Myers first flirted with the role several years ago before he got sidetracked with the Austin Powers pictures, but he is reportedly determined now to make the Moon movie.
Who lead singer Roger Daltrey is producing the movie with Spitfire Pictures, the company working with Daltrey and Pete Townshend on the documentary about their band, My Generation: Who's Still Who.
Dressing up 'My Mother'
Undressing My Mother is the only Irish entry among the 14 shorts shortlisted for the Prix UIP at the European Film Awards, to be held in December at a ceremony in Berlin. Ken Wardrop's movie previously took the jury prize for best Irish short film and the audience award for best international short at last year's Cork Film Festival.
Cutting Kubrick
Robert Ryang, a 25-year-old assistant film editor in Manhattan, recently entered a competition organised by the New York chapter of the Association of Independent Creative Editors. The challenge: to cut a new trailer for an existing movie, presenting it in a different genre. The rules: only the sound and dialogue could be modified, not the visuals. Ryang won, and now Hollywood is calling.
His entry, using footage from Stanley Kurbick's 1980 horror movie The Shining, is a hoot, reworking the material as a trailer for Shining, a sentimental comedy about the relationship between a boy and his father, a blocked writer. It even dares to run Peter Gabriel's Solisbury Hill, now reduced to a romcom soundtrack cliche, over the end of the trailer. Check it out at www.ps260.com/ molly/SHINING FINAL.mov
