The Malaysian Insider :: Showbiz
The Malaysian Insider :: Showbiz |
| ‘The Lady’: The life of Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi Posted: 01 Dec 2011 03:11 AM PST
Malaysian star Michelle Yeoh, a former "Bond girl", plays "The Lady" in a two-hour biopic that focuses on the private life of Suu Kyi, her British husband Michael Aris and their two sons. Suu Kyi's struggle for her country came at a high personal cost. Her husband died in 1999 in Britain, and in the final stages of his battle with cancer the Myanmar junta denied him a visa to see his wife. Suu Kyi refused to leave Myanmar to see him, certain she would never have been allowed to return. "It was the price she had to pay," said Luc Besson. "Thousands of people give their lives unquestioningly, simply because they believe it is a just cause." "The love that united her with her husband gave her immense strength," said Michelle Yeoh. The daughter of Myanmar's assassinated independence hero General Aung San, Suu Kyi began her own political career late after spending much of her life abroad. She studied at Oxford University, had two sons after marrying Aris and looked like she was going to settle into life in Britain. But when she returned to Yangon in 1988 to nurse her sick mother, protests erupted against the military, which ended with a brutal crackdown that left at least 3,000 dead. She took a leading role in the pro-democracy movement, delivering speeches to crowds of hundreds of thousands. This is the point where Besson's film takes up her story. Yeoh, who learned Burmese to help her play the part, said she finally got to meet Suu Kyi at her crumbling lakeside mansion in Yangon, where she was under house arrest, as filming was winding down in Thailand. "She walked up to me to embrace me and take my hand," she said. "She looks fragile but she emanates great strength." Besson also met the subject of his film after her release last November, when filming on the project had already finished. He recalled finding himself outside the house which his team had scrupulously recreated "practically to the centimetre" in Thailand, where most of the film was shot. The French filmmaker, whose recent movies also include the popular animated "Arthur" series, did manage to film some scenes in Myanmar itself, where he posed as a tourist and shot with a small camera. "I filmed 17 hours of rushes, sometimes with a soldier three metres away," he recalled. The film's actors were then super-imposed on the Myanmar scenes with the help of "green screen" technology. Suu Kyi told Besson that she was not yet ready to watch the two-hour film which covers the deaths of her father and her husband. "She told me 'I'll see it when I'm courageous enough,'" he said earlier this month. But one of her sons has seen it and "was very moved," the director added. Besson said he had cried when he first read the script and immediately decided to make "The Lady". "It's very moving when you look at this woman who is fighting for neither power nor money but so that her people can be free," he said. – AFP Full content generated by Get Full RSS. |
| Daniel Radcliffe to portray poet Allen Ginsberg Posted: 01 Dec 2011 02:27 AM PST  Daniel Radcliffe may portray the young Beat poet Allen Ginsberg in the independent thriller 'Kill Your Darlings.' – AFP pic Set in New York in the mid-1940s, the story follows the friendships between Ginsberg and writers Jack Kerouac and Lucien Carr, who murdered an older admirer, David Kammerer, a friend of author William S. Burroughs. Radcliffe would be replacing Jesse Eisenberg (The Social Network), who originally took on the role in 2009. It is not confirmed if Chris Evans (Captain America), set to play Kerouac, and Ben Whishaw (Brideshead Revisited), set to play Carr, remain with the project. James Franco played Ginsberg in Howl in 2010. Another film about the Beat era, On the Road, based on Kerouac's seminal book, will be released in 2012 starring Kristen Stewart, Kirsten Dunst, Amy Adams and Viggo Mortensen. Written and directed by John Krokidas in his first feature-length film, Kill Your Darlings is scheduled for release in 2012. Radcliffe is appearing in the revival of the 1960s musical How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying until December. Next, he will be seen in the gothic thriller The Woman in Black, due in cinemas early in 2012. – AFP Full content generated by Get Full RSS. |
PARIS, Dec 1 – Myanmar's democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi got a celluloid reincarnation yesterday when a movie version of her life by "Fifth Element" and "The Big Blue" director Luc Besson was released in France.| You are subscribed to email updates from The Malaysian Insider :: Showbiz To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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