DB7

Dark Materials film gets green light

Charlotte Higgins, arts correspondent
Friday June 30, 2006
The Guardian

An unknown British schoolgirl will play Lyra Belacqua in the movie adaptation of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials. The first film in the putative trilogy, to be called The Golden Compass, was given the green light yesterday by New Line, the company behind The Lord of the Rings films. It is to have a budget of £83m.

Ten thousand girls turned up for open auditions in Cambridge, Oxford, Exeter and Kendal. But it was 12-year-old Dakota Blue Richards who caught the casting directors' eye in Cambridge.

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Pullman said: "She's absolutely marvellous - and she looks right. I know Lyra better than anyone. Looking like someone isn't a case of having blond hair and blue eyes: it's about bone structure; the way someone carries herself.

"She is also a very good actress. At 12, she hasn't had time to be fully trained, but that was not what we were looking for. It a was question of getting someone who can be the part."

The film will start shooting in September, with a release date in autumn 2007. New Line was lured to Shepperton Studios by the chancellor's new tax credit arrangements for film-making in the UK, after fears that the film would be shot in studios in Prague. According to a New Line spokesman, locations are being sought now, in Iceland and Greenland as well as the UK. The director, Chris Weitz, has also visited Worcester College, Oxford, as a potential location for Jordan, the fictional college where Lyra lives.

The film has had its setbacks. Tom Stoppard was originally to write the screenplay, but left when Weitz, who co-wrote Antz and directed About a Boy, came in as screenwriter-director.

Weitz was then dropped as director, though not writer, with New Line citing "technical difficulties". But the move came shortly after claims - denied by Pullman - that Weitz had come under pressure from New Line to water down some of the anti-religious material in the novels to popularise the films in the US. Weitz was replaced by Anand Tucker - only to be reappointed last month.

Pullman said: "They have been very good at keeping in contact with me. I don't have script approval, or anything like that, but we have been working on a very friendly basis. I make suggestions, which they might take up, or explain why it can't happen - that's the way it goes."

Weitz, who was born in New York in 1970, went to St Paul's school in London and read English literature at Trinity College, Cambridge. "He knows the world that my character lives in, which is a great help," Pullman said. New Line will hope that The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass will prove as big a moneyspinner as The Lord of the Rings trilogy. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring alone grossed £469m. The creation of a high-quality franchise based on adaptations of successful children's books has proved a winning formula for the film industry - the exemplar being Harry Potter.