A retrospective in honor of Academy Award-winning actress Julianne Moore, who was the special guest for Feature VII, a fundraiser benefiting Film Streams.
In 2003, The New Yorker’s David Denby asked screenwriter David Hare about the monumental task of adapting Michael Cunningham’s novel “The Hours” for the screen. Cunningham’s book is full of rich details, that in the film are translated visually into the mise-en-scene and into the brilliant performances by Nicole Kidman, Meryl Streep, and Julianne Moore.
Hare responded, “[To incorporate details from the book], you assume that the director and the actors are going to read the book. I think that it’s a serious point, and it’s particularly about Julianne Moore: the film concerns three different women, two of whom are hyperarticulate — one of them is Virginia Woolf, and the other is a publisher in modern New York — but the third of whom is not articulate at all, she doesn’t say anything. And I was able in the script not to give her anything to say because Julianne Moore had read the book. She read the book and rang the producer, Scott Rudin, and said, ‘I want to play this character in the book.’ She arrived and gave the performance of somebody who knew who the character was. And when I said to Julianne, ‘How’s the script?,’ she said, ‘Fine.’ I said, ‘Have you got any problem?’ ‘No. None whatsoever.’ And that’s because the script didn’t positively get in the way of her playing what she’d read in the book, which is what she’d originally responded to.”
