'Hemingway & Gellhorn': How The HBO Movie Came To Be Made

Scott Timberg at the Los Angeles Times offers a piece on how the director Phil Kaufman and the actors Nicole Kidman and Clive Owens came to be involved in the HBO movie about writer Ernest Hemingway and his wife Martha Gellhorn.

Inspired by what he called "a stormin' script," Owen threw himself into the role of Papa Hemingway in a way he never had before. "At first it's daunting. God, I'm English, playing an iconic American writer. But I immersed myself in everything Hemingway. I took months and months, read everything he wrote, read everything about him. Had endless talks with Phil about him."

Owen visited places Hemingway had been — Cuba, Spain, France — struck by the adulation and fondness he seemed to leave behind him and spent days with recordings of Hemingway's voice ringing in his ears. He also put on weight to play this man of enormous appetites. But Owen does not speak with the portentous tone of the Hemingway character played by Corey Stoll in Woody Allen's "Midnight in Paris."

"I think he's an absolutely amazing writer," says Owen, who had known Hemingway's work only slightly. "A bit out of fashion at the moment, because of the whole macho thing, the bullfighting and safaris. The feminist movement buried him a bit. But I would argue that a lot of the writing is hugely sensitive. He was the beginning of the economy of language: The discipline, the way he extracted the fat and honed and honed."

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/movies/la-ca-hemingway-gellhorn-20120520,0,3035397.story