Word: hallstr
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...John after New Line surrendered the property when the company got folded into its parent, Warner Bros. - was to open the movie on Super Bowl weekend, when American males, a big part of Avatar's constituency, were preoccupied with large men running, throwing and writhing in pain. Director Lasse Hallström, who has helmed such dewy fare as Chocolat, Something to Talk About and The Shipping News, gave the remaining femme audience the standard Harlequin cocktail of a handsome soldier (G.I. Joe's Channing Tatum), an idealistic gal (Amanda Seyfried, of Mamma Mia! and Big Love...
...that standard, The Shipping News was perfect. Hallström was set to direct after wrapping 1995's Something to Talk About, which starred Julia Roberts. But the densely layered storytelling in E. Annie Proulx's celebrated book about Quoyle, a widower who moves to his ancestral hometown in Canada, proved difficult to translate to screen. Unhappy with the script, Hallström quit. The project went through four writers, two other directors and two leading men (John Travolta and Billy Bob Thornton) before a more experienced Hallström agreed to try again...
Such projects usually become pariahs. No one wants to work on them because everyone doubts they'll ever make it to the cinema. But Hallström pushed, getting Robert Nelson Jacobs (Chocolat) to pen a new script and recruiting an A-list cast. Kevin Spacey, who plays Quoyle, said Hallström was "the right kind of director to capture what was very difficult to put on film." Cate Blanchett and Julianne Moore, who signed on as Quoyle's love interests, both praised the freedom Hallström gives actors. "I don't impose performances," he says...
...this case, it also took on-location filming in windswept, fogbound Newfoundland and some post-production fiddling. Hallström gripes a little about the tweaks done in response to test screenings: "With this one, which was meant to be crooked, you can't straighten it out too much," he says. Nonetheless, he's "very proud" of the end result, which is "mysterious and ambiguous and moody...
This may be the time for another project: a move from New York, where he has lived for the past few years, back to Stockholm. Johan, his 24-year-old son from his first marriage, still lives in Sweden, and Hallström and his wife, actress Lena Olin, want their other children - her son August, 15, and their daughter Tora, 6 - to grow up Swedish, not American. He also would like to work on a film in his native language. In the U.S.,"I have this feeling of being a visitor who is having an adventure," he says...