Highschool Musical clips HERE

Carrie Bradshaw - as a Teenager

Fancy reading about Carrie in her High School days when there was probably no sex and no city?

Candace Bushnell, the author of the column that became the hit series and movie, is writing a novel about Carrie Bradshaw's teenaged years, HarperCollins announced Wednesday.

"I've always been interested in exploring Carrie's teenage years," Bushnell said in a statement. "Carrie in high school did not follow the crowd - she led it. It was there that she began observing and commenting on the social scene."

The novel, part of a two-book deal, is due for publication in fall 2010. That’s one film role for an ingénue the girls of America had better get ready for

HBO website is here.

Hamlet 2: The Review

It was a big deal at Sundance – the breakthrough movie, they were saying, for British comedian Steve Coogan in the US. Somehow I doubt it.

Coogan plays Dana Marschz , a resting actor formerly best known for his Herpecol ads. “I'm having herpes outbreak, but you'd never know it.". These days he’s working for peanuts conducting a high school drama class in Tucson, Arizona. His class are mostly disinterested and the red-necked school principal is keen to shut the whole thing down. To make matters worse his wife Brie (played brilliantly by Catherine Keener) is about to leave him, fed up by his lack of resources, his whimsy and his other-worldly faith in the universal healing power of drama.

The plot is a conventional, teasing take on those dozens of movies about inspirational teachers and drama/dance classes bringing students together against an unfair school authority. Coogan does fecklessness very well – tapping into a long line of comedic British fecklessness from Stanley Laurel to Peter Sellers.

Faced with his drama program being closed down, his character Marschz has to produce an illicitly staged musical called Hamlet 2 which takes the Shakespeare play and gives it a happy ending. There’s nothing new about this. Thomas Bowdler overhauled Shakespeare’s plays (to make them less sexualised) in the 19th Century – the origin of the term Bowdlerization.

The climax is the staging when everything comes right – it looks as glossy as Broadway production (yeah, right) and the national press are there to report on the school trying to close the whole thing down. Initially the musical is perceived as very un-PC with songs such as Rock Me Sexy Jesus. Frankly, there’s nothing un-PC about the show we see. Director Andrew Fleming pulls his punches. His background of soft-peddled TV comedy-drama just doesn’t equip him with that extra bit of sourness he needs. Hamlet 2 been marketed as a South Park relative; Nancy Drew would be more accurate.

This not a bad film. It has some great moments, but it does feel oddly underpowered. Everything feels just a tiny bit threadbare.

Coogan had yet to find his knock-out, world-beating Hollywood role.

** Two Stars out of Five

An interview with Zhang Ziyi

Who is Zhang Ziyi? Her almond-shaped face and lightning martial arts moves lit up Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and made her an international star. Now she’s been cast as the lead in Memoirs of a Geisha, the long talked-off Japanese epic that was to have been made by Steven Spielberg. Rob Marshall, Oscar-nominated for Chicago, will direct with Spielberg overseeing in the wings as producer. Filming has already started in LA – mere weeks after her latest film Hero (actually two years old, but that’s another Miramax story) astounded industry box-office watchers by going straight to the top slot in the US. In one weekend it virtually made back what Harvey Weinstein paid for it, a cool $20 million according to Peter Biskind’s recent Miramax exposé Down and Dirty Pictures.

Details are very sketchy about this Beijiing-born actress, who until very recently didn’t speak any English. What is she like to work with and what sort of person is she? I flew up to Edinburgh to meet legendary cinematographer Chris Doyle, who photographed her so well in Hero and Wong Kar Wai’s forthcoming 2046, taking time out from giving a masterclass during the Edinburgh Film Festival. Doyle, who has photographed many of the great Chinese actresses, agreed that the camera loves her but try as we might we couldn’t quite get to the essence of her appeal. Words that kept cropping up were to do with freshness and poise – but little to do with acting ability. Was she really, as the Chinese press has been bitching, just a lucky model who stumbled into acting? Zhang Ziyi’s feud with the Chinese media – especially the Hong Kong press who accuse her of all manner of diva-like activities, including huge entourages – has escalated since Cannes this year, which she visited with Wong Kar Wai.

I barely knew anything about Zhang. A dozen drooling fansites on the internet all repeat these few basic facts, endlessly, in that fugue that beauty and celebrity seems to create in some people. They’re mostly taken from the very few interviews she has given to promote films as various and forgettable as Tsui Hark’s Zu: Warriors of the Magic Mountain to Rush Hour II. An elfin 5ft 5in tall and 25 years old, she’s the worldwide face of Maybelline cosmetics and her list of commercial endorsements is vast and growing – including Korean mineral water, Tag Hauer watches and Coca-Cola in Asia. She trained at the China Central Drama College, the Chinese equivalent of RADA, and was clearly an ambitious student. Before she even got there, aged 15, she won a National Dance Competition. But her history is also littered with sudden reversals – quitting dance in disgust at its limitations, and earlier, being so oppressed by the nature of competitive gymnastics at her school that she actually ran away from home.

In order to find out more I tracked down Zhang Yimou – long before he made Hero one of China’s best-known directors in the West with films like Raise the Red Lantern. I had been told he had discovered Zhang Ziyi while casting for a shampoo advert in Beijing and was only too happy to talk about his beautiful protégé, whom he gave a small role in Hero and the lead role in its follow-up House of Flying Daggers (watch out for it at the London Film Festival and a Boxing Day general release). Some years ago tongues were wagging about the exact nature of Yimou’s relationship with Ziyi – after all her predecessor, directorial muse Gong Li, also dated the man – but neither party has ever spoken publicly on the matter. The Asian press ungenerously dubbed her ‘little Gong Li’ – which apparently annoyed the young actress. No diva likes to be compared to another diva. Besides, he’s old enough to be her father.

‘I wanted a girl with long hair,’ Zhang Yimou explained to me through an interpreter at the Dorchester Hotel. ‘And her hair wasn’t long enough for the shampoo advert. But one year later I was about to make A Road Home. I suddenly remembered her at the auditions, since I needed a completely fresh person for the central role, of girl falling for a teacher. I cast her. She couldn’t act very well at first, but she learns fast’.

When a pigtailed and pouty Zhang Ziyi first appears in this debut film, set in 1950’s rural China, the previous monochrome of the film is transformed into rich and luscious colours. It’s quite a trick. Stephen Holden in the New York Times subsequently wrote about his impression of this startling new actress. ‘Ms. Zhang's intensely concentrated performance conveys a current of stubborn, obsessive passion lurking behind girlish wide-eyed innocence’, he gushes. ‘This is a woman who, on recognizing her destiny, will let nothing stand in the way of her seizing it.’ Only a year or so later the actress was telling Time Asia ‘I want to prove to everyone that I have talent’

Zhang Yimou recommended Zhang Ziyi to Ang Lee when the latter was searching for the right actress for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Her appearance as Jen – a supremely skilled swordswoman secretly resisting an arranged marriage – transformed her fortunes. She was – she has admitted – jealous of the attention Ang Lee lavished on Michelle Yeoh thanks to her lack of Chinese and some of that chemistry sparks there with the clashing swords.

Her boyish, androgynous qualities were emphasized – especially in her swordfight with Michelle Yeoh, a brilliantly stylized catfight in all but name. ‘After I watched the film I realized that Ang Lee had made her change,’ remarks Zhang Yimou with obvious admiration. ‘She had changed from simply being a girl, and had matured. She was another person from the one I knew. I gave her a small role in Hero but it was an important, passionate one. I realized she had learnt to express or hold back as she likes – which in China is quite rare. Rare too are actors who can actually fight’.

Zhang Yimou directed Gong Li is seven memorable films. How does Ziyi compare? ‘They are entirely different, representing two generations - Gong Li depicts a classical, traditional Chinese woman and Ziyi is a modern woman, more individual’. But both usually play strong, willful women who won’t take no for an answer? ‘That is true’.

I was really going to have to talk to the woman herself. I had recently just seen House of Flying Daggers – a film that finally makes her seem entirely feminine and combines her twin abilities to play the tumbling tomboy and the delicate flower. I’d talked to people who had worked with her and read about her upcoming roles. An interview was arranged and then called off as Geisha approached its first day of filming. I ended up taking her call sitting in a car in a car-park at midnight, on an Italian cellphone in Venice during the recent Venice Film Festival. You’ve no idea the effect this information has on an awful lot of men aged 17 upwards – even now I have to keep denying I have her phone number.

The immediate impression was of a giggly teenager full of self-confidence and charm. Do you ever get sick of being beautiful? ‘Not often,’ she laughs. Do you enjoy being beautiful? ‘No, I don’t care’. Are many people frightened by your presumed martial arts abilities? ‘No, I need bodyguards – I teach my bodyguards! Hahahah!’

In fact Zhang has adapted her prodigious gymnastic abilities and dance training to give the illusion of martial arts abilities. She’s only been in Hollywood for two weeks now – everything happens fast when it happens in Hollywood – busy learning English as fast as she can. Her Rush Hour II co-star Chris Tucker once said of her ‘I think what makes her so sexy is that she doesn’t speak English’. She manages some conversation with me but regularly has to be helped out with a studio translator. Do you have English words on your fridge and phone and places like that, like regular people learning a language? ‘On my mirror,’ she volunteers. Of course – the mirror. When will you become fluent? ‘It takes forever,’ she sighs.

Gong Li and Michelle Yeoh will act with her in Geisha, where she plays a young woman sold by her poverty-stricken parents to a Geisha house in Kyoto. In fact all the leads have gone to Chinese actresses, to the chagrin of the Japanese. What do you say to the Japanese actresses who feel they should have been cast? ‘They should learn martial arts, hahahah!’

You must have a famous actress you admire. ‘I love Bjork, I love her so much. I love Dancer in the Dark! I’d love to be in a film with her’. Despite her laughter and froth its clear she has a strong work ethic. ‘I need to work harder,’ she says. Do you know anyone in LA? ‘Hardly anyone’. Jet Li who helped you out so much in Hero? ‘He’s gone back to Shanghai’. You mentioned Jet Li taught you how to protect yourself – did he teach you how to protect yourself in Hollywood? ‘No, no, hahahahah!’ If I bump into Steven Spielberg on the Lido tomorrow, what shall I tell him from you? ‘Relax! Hahahah!’

After telling me she’s dying to come to London because she’s heard so much about the clubs, and the London Eye, our conversation ends. I can’t say the experience has been very illuminating but as with many actors what you see onscreen is what you get – she saves herself for the screen. Zhang Ziyi is about to become the most famous Chinese woman on the planet, and it sounds like she’s enjoying the prospect very much.

You can find a fansite with up-to-date information here I talked to Ziyi on the phone, parked in a car in a car-park in Mestre, Venice, 2005, a distinctly surreal experience.

Being Kurt Cobain

‘I wasn’t going to turn down the chance to put on a dress,’ laughs Michael Pitt. We’re sitting in a hotel room in the Czech Republic shortly before an air raid siren goes off outside in the town, and turns him white as a sheet. Till that point he’d been more than usually amiable. He wears a dress, looking drugged-up, bedraggled and mad, for some of the scenes in Last Days, the new film directed by Gus Van Sant. It’s a film loosely based on the life of the Nirvana singer whom, conspiracy theories aside, died by his own hand in 1994. It seems the Nirvana front-man really did like wandering round his house in Courtney Love’s wardrobe (not a good look, even on a woman) brandishing a rifle. Except for one thing. This is not a film about Kurt Cobain. The damaged, depressive rock star that Pitt portrays in Last Days is called Blake (‘it’s sort of a poetic reference to Kurt’ claims Van Sant) and consequently all similarities between Blake and Cobain are purely coincidental. Got it?

Michael Pitt is relaxed. This in itself is astonishing. He’s in the spa town of Karlovy Vary for its annual festival, a distinguished but very low-key film festival famous for making visiting Hollywood types slough off their LA paranoia. Usually when journalists meet this rangy 24 year-old New Jersey actor it’s clear that he’d rather be having violent root canal work with veterinary instruments rather than talking about his films and his life in any detail. It’s not that he’s ungracious. Merely confused and discomfited. Those who interviewed him onset for his biggest role to date, in Bertolucci’s The Dreamers, had to get used to him fielding questions while lying on the floor. Others who met him in Cannes or New York junkets recently found him wired, fidgety and chain-smoking all the way through their allotted time.

But there’s an essential, winning sweetness about him that’s hard not to notice and be impressed by. He seems – as ever – slightly frail, etiolated, childlike and ethereal. As he talked and gestured with his slender hands I looked for the self-harming scars that were rumoured to mark his arms. I failed to see any. He’d got up early, had a massage in one of the famous local spas, and then taken a walk in the pine woods that stretch up the hillside to clear his head. ‘I like the forest,’ he says in his soft New Jersey drawl, his nostrils twitching with the memory of the pine scent.

He went to live in the forest while he was making Last Days, the last of a trilogy of films by Van Sant that began with Gerry (2002) and continued with Elephant (2003) (‘they’re each about death,’ Van Sant has observed, who when you think about it, looks like a mortician in Six Foot Under). ‘I had a house in the middle of the woods,’ Pitt recalls, like an imperilled child in a fairytale. ‘I stayed alone the whole time and I tried always to be battling with the things I thought the character was battling with – seclusion, drug addiction, severe chronic depression and suicidal tendencies’. The result is a striking performance that once seen is impossible to forget. It’s creepy, lingering and potent as a draught of deadly nightshade. Pitt, his long locks of yellow hair hanging over his face for much of the time in the film, mumbles incoherently as he stumbles about his dilapidated mansion and nearby woodland gardens, performing small tasks, making macaroni cheese, answering the phone and not saying anything, trying to play songs on his guitar and finally overdosing in the guest house.

Many have complained that the film just isn’t right. Not what they expected. Connoisseurs of standard Hollywood rock and roll movies, who have gone to see the film without actually reading up on it, expecting junkie chic and cool music biz scenes, have been infuriated and angry at this languid and mysterious descent into the deathly and distempered that Van Sant has come up with and called a film. One cinemagoer in Seattle even upbraided Van Sant for allowing Pitt to play guitar with the wrong hand (‘have they tried to play left-handed?’ counters Pitt). They all know that Van Sant knew Kurt Cobain. They all know that Cobain was considering doing a Van Sant film in the last months of his life, and that Cobain had lobbied Van Sant to get a friend a role on Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. They know that Van Sant discussed the idea of the movie with Courtney Love, and has shown it to Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic.

Still, Van Sant has taken a line and everyone is sticking to it. ‘It wasn’t a biopic,’ insists Pitt. ‘It wasn’t based on times and dates. I realised in Cannes when I was doing interviews because I was talking about this so much – it’s not a film about Kurt, it’s a film for Kurt. And I’ve mentioned that to Gus recently. ‘

Pitt has described in the past how he was a latchkey kid to a ‘lower working class family’ who ran away to New York aged fifteen, went to live in a Chinatown squat with artists and poets before ending up in a stage production and, finally, the anodyne TV series Dawson’s Creek which he hated. He’s a classic product of downtown Avenue A culture - the rapidly disappearing milieu of the Beat poets. It’s not surprising then that he should be attracted to alt.culture icons like Larry Clark (he worked with him in Bully) and Van Sant (a chum of William Burroughs after all) and seek to make films with them, since they still give some dim idea of ‘outsider’ culture in a mainstream America that has now turned on the idea.

Its also been suggested that another misfit and outsider called River Phoenix is an inspiration for the film, and that the Blake figure is in some ways an amalgam of both Kurt Cobain and the tragic young actor who overdosed on speedballs in LA in the middle of filming Dark Blood. At the time of their deaths – mere weeks apart – many cultural commentators where speculating whether the suicide of Cobain or the accidental death of Phoenix (real name Bottom) would have a more profound and lasting effect on a certain generation. It soon became clear that Cobain was the man who held the torch for maudlin youth. But for Van Sant Phoenix’s death had a powerful and lasting effect. He wrote the novel Pink in 1997 to exorcise the fitful ghost of Phoenix, who had lit up My Own Private Idaho. I met him when he was promoting Good Will Hunting years later and we talked of nothing else but River Phoenix.

Almost empathetically Michael Pitt confuses the two, Cobain and Phoenix, during the questions. He never talked about the Phoenix connection with Van Sant during filming, he confirms. ‘When I was a kid I really looked up to River,’ he says dreamily. ‘He might have had something to do with why I became an actor’. Another question asks where he was at the time of Phoenix’s death, and he inadvertently starts talking about Cobain. ‘I wasn’t a fan when the whole thing was going on,’ he recalls. ‘I was in sixth grade and one day everyone is school was dressed in black. And they were saying Kurt Cobain just died today! And it really struck me because this was a school primarily where people were into rap and R & B.’

So far I understand there have been no River Phoenix fans sending hatemail to Van Sant because his character doesn’t buy a rain forest during the course of the film, and after all the musical aspect of the Blake figure tilts its interpretation towards a Cobain interpretation. The music in the film is not Nirvana music, much of it is original material by Michael Pitt and his band Pagoda who performed a set at Cannes this year (though the movie does open and close with a recording of Jancquin La Guerre’s 14th century French chorale). Pagoda is something of a preoccupation with the actor right now, who is busy recording an album which should be ready ‘by Fall’. ‘People don’t go out of their way to tell me I suck! Eventually what I want to be doing is directing, but music is a younger beast and I want to tackle that now – I can direct when I’m 60 if I want to’.

The inevitable question is how accurate can Michael Pitt ever be about drug use? ‘I researched it,’ he admits. ‘I have friends who have been in situations…it was something I could re-create. Initially I had the bright idea that I was going to do the whole film drunk or something…which thank god I didn’t. Someone talked to me. I was probably the cleanest I’ve ever been for that film. I didn’t drink beer’.

In fact he deplores the glamorisation of drug use in the movies, even if Trainspotting was a film that galvanised him as a youth. ‘Whenever there’s a junkie played you have a shot of the needle and the arm…What is this romance? Or Requiem for a Dream which is another movie I love. It has this shock thing. Look how I can shock you’.

In fact the most illicit substance in the movie is macaroni cheese made with far too much milk, which is apparently just the way Kurt Cobain used to make it.

He’s asked whether he thinks suicide is selfish. ‘I see why people think it’s selfish and sometimes I do. And sometimes I don’t think it’s selfish. I’m probably an atheist though I was raised a catholic – and that whole religion is based upon the first suicide in many ways’.

He’s spent the last few years avoiding career suicide by steering clear of Hollywood movies, wary of even identifying what the offers were when asked. ‘Because I look up to Kurt and River Phoenix I’ve been fore-warned and a lot of my decisions I’ve made in my career are to counteract my fame’. He recounts with a shudder how he was chased by schoolchildren in the New York subway after appearances in Dawson’s Creek. Fame makes him nervous. Filming in Paris with Bertolucci for The Dreamers he was disturbed when people called him ‘sir’. It seemed surreal and slightly fake. What did people want from him? Could he even give them what they want?

‘If you grow up in a lower working class environment when most people think of you as trash, and then you get to this other place where people who normally wouldn’t be talking to you want something out of you. I could have made decisions to be more known. I’m pretty broke now but I’m sure I could have had a couple of million dollars’.

Pitt talks about filming Last Days with a kind of raptness and hero-worship of Van Sant that is very charming. He is, he thinks, ‘the best American filmmaker we have’ and you feel he really means it. The techniques of improvisation they developed while filming seemed to the young actor a liberating experience. The initial days shooting was just a trudge into the Oregon woods with Van Sant, Pitt, the legendary cameraman Harry Savides and a couple of focus pullers. ‘We had a 12 page script and it was just a map,’ Pitt recalls. ‘Gus would kind of orchestrate everyone’s ideas. Now when I get a script…’ his voice fades away with a grimace.

The air raid siren that went off in the middle of the interview is a strange hangover, a civic exercise lingering on from Soviet-era Czechosolovakia, a terrible wailing noise that filled the room and for a moment seemed to freeze Pitt in terror. But then he laughed about it. He’d been long enough in the pine-woods this morning to orientate himself and feel calm. Last Days may be about a suicide but it seems to have filled this unusual and fragile young actor with hope, whatever threats may fill the skies.