Word: blanchette
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...world's most valuable commodity, and places like Dharavi will have none." Two: he's going to make a film about it. This project, Water (Paani in Hindi), has become such an obsession that despite commitments to direct Morgan Freeman in a film about Nelson Mandela and Cate Blanchett and Geoffrey Rush in a sequel to Elizabeth, as well as co-writing a biopic on the life of Buddha, Kapur recently left the West after 10 years in London and Los Angeles and moved back to Bombay. "This," he says grandly...
...supposed to care about numbers. But before he became a director in the early 1980s (after some limited success as a Bollywood actor and director of TV ads), Kapur worked for Burmah Oil in London."There aren't too many feature-film directors who began life as accountants," observes Blanchett. Today, Kapur is as comfortable at a business conference or giving a speech about fossil fuels as he is attending a film festival. "Actually, I believe that all creative people are schizophrenic," he says. Kapur's interest in the business of show biz runs to helping set up the Indian...
...Hollywood, America still struck him as the center of the creative universe. With a virtual monopoly on budgets and technical skill, L.A. was clearly the place to be for a foreign director with a single art-house hit, Bandit Queen. He was an immediate success. In 1998, Kapur directed Blanchett in Elizabeth, about the life of England's 16th century monarch. The movie was nominated for seven Oscars, winning one. Its magic, says Blanchett, lay in Kapur's slightly demented reinvention of period drama. "Elizabeth could have been incredibly musty," she says, "but Shekhar brought this East-West sensibility...
...Blanchett did indeed become a star, in movies like The Talented Mr. Ripley and Lord of the Rings. But Kapur's progress was less stellar. He made money, sure. On the Asian Rich List of the London Sunday Times, his wealth is estimated at $7 million. But his output was limited and oddly conventional. He directed the disappointing historical epic The Four Feathers (2002) and helped produce Andrew Lloyd Webber's striking but lowbrow Bombay Dreams (2004). Naseeruddin Shah, star of Monsoon Wedding and Kapur's 1983 debut Masoom (The Innocent), acknowledges Kapur's gift, calling him "the only Indian...
...years after being labeled "box-office poison," Katharine Hepburn returned to Hollywood, starring in the film version of the Philip Barry comedy she had performed in on Broadway. Cannily, she let her character be pushed around--literally, by Cary Grant--while radiating a patrician glow even Cate Blanchett couldn't match. James Stewart is the working-class fella who briefly obscures the Grant-Hepburn limelight, and George Cukor directs with his usual quiet mastery. Those lusciously long takes remind viewers that star quality, not editing, is the essence of classic Hollywood cinema. The DVD has some cool extras, including Hepburn...