09/03/2007

Goya-winning director Isabel Coixet will make her Hollywood debut with Elegy, based on Philip Roth’s novel "The Dying Animal". The film will star Pénélope Cruz alongside with UK veteran Sir Ben Kingsley and US actors Patricia Clarkson and Peter Sarsgaard.

The director is already in Vancouver, Canada, where principal photography is scheduled to start on April 24. The €22.8m film is being produced by US Company Lakeshore Entertainment (Million Dollar Baby).

Coixet, who wrote two previous features, My Life Without Me [+see also:
trailer
film profile] and The Secret Life of Words [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Isabel Coixet
film profile] (see Focus), this time received the script from the studio. She was free though to introduce some changes to the plot, which focuses on the relationship between an older professor (Kingsley) and a young Cuban student (Cruz).

"Erotic scenes are crucial to the film", announced the Catalan director. "I want to show the power of the body, of the flesh, of the skin. In this sense it won't be a typical Hollywood film, it will be more like [Michael] Winterbottom's 9 Songs and [Marc] Forster's Monster's Ball than Basic Instinct”. Back in 2003 Coixet had declined DreamWorks’ proposal to adapt "Memoirs of a Geisha" for the screen.

As for Cruz, Elegy will be her first film in 2007 before she heads to Barcelona in the summer to star along with Javier Bardem in Woody Allen's upcoming film (see news).