A Director Confronts Some Dark Material

Pullman was instrumental in luring Weitz back to the movie. After a second director came and went, he sent Weitz a handwritten letter, urging him to reconsider. An apparatus had sprung up around the film since Weitz had left: blueprints for a lavish production design by Oscar winner Dennis Gassner ("The Truman Show"), a coherent visual-effects strategy and a theatrical release date. "It suddenly seemed possible," Weitz says. His fears didn't vanish, but his years away from the film, during which he met his future wife, helped put matters in perspective. The couple had their first child, a boy, in June. "I find it easier to not worry so much. That's got to be age. Mellowing. A lot of therapy."

Much has been made of Weitz's inexperience with big-budget filmmaking, but he did bring one crucial talent: a gift for directing child actors. Dakota Blue Richards, the newcomer who plays the cunning, puckish Lyra, responded to an open casting call after seeing the National Theater's stage production of "The Golden Compass." She hadn't acted before, and never really wanted to. She just wanted to be Lyra. "I like to think I'm quite brave," Richards said during an interview on the set, the first of her life. "I stand up for myself. I don't let other people tell me what to do." Then she glanced at her mother, sitting nearby. "Unless it's my mum."

"Usually it's a gut-wrenching decision," Weitz says of casting Richards. "You realize how much rests on the shoulders of this person you're selecting. But I really didn't have any doubts. Dakota has a feral quality, something not quite tamed. She's completely unformulaic." In fact, she feels plucked straight from the novel. In the film's opening sequence, Lyra is rough-housing with a bunch of boys, and she's the imperious leader of the pack. But when the day's play ends, her warrior fa?ade melts into an impish smile. "OK, see you later, Billy," she says to her mate, then scampers home.

Pullman's fantasia is unusual for the genre: girls rule the roost. The author says he always envisioned Kidman playing Mrs. Coulter and wrote her a note saying so. "It's not so flattering when you think about it," Kidman says, laughing. Coulter is elegant, persuasive and chilling, which is how a lot of people find Kidman's acting. In her previous life as Mrs. Cruise, Kidman was often required to handle sensitive questions about his connection to Scientology. So it's not a surprise that she's well prepared for the controversy surrounding the film and doesn't even wait for a reporter to bring it up. "The story is more about authority now, rather than religion, which was important to me. I've been raised as a strong Catholic, and my grandmother would not be happy, or my dad for that matter, if we'd followed that part of the book." Kidman will deliver some version of this answer in just about every press interview she gives over the next year. NEWSWEEK's visit coincided with her final day of work on the film, and when her last scene was shot, Kidman handed out gifts to the crew and left—and everyone seemed to relax. People tend to worry when movie stars are around, whether they need to or not.

Studios, on the other hand, tend to worry when movie stars aren't around, which may explain the late decision to insert McKellen as the voice of Iorek Byrnison, the armored bear. "I lost that one," Weitz says, though, he adds, "if you're going to have anyone recast in your movie, you're happy it's Ian McKellen." Originally, Weitz gave the part to a British stage actor named Nonso Anozie. "I never thought the guy sounded like Iorek," says Toby Emmerich, New Line's president of production. "You want to support your director, so we said OK. But I just never stopped thinking that this guy didn't sound right." McKellen took over this past spring. "That's probably a function of 'Lord of the Rings' being such a watershed experience for everybody here," Emmerich says. "It's just in our DNA." The trouble is, Iorek is one of Pullman's most beloved creations—and on screen, when he opens his mouth, out comes the voice of Gandalf. Pullman fans are touchy about Tolkien. They believe they've got the superior trilogy, and they might wince at a decision that appears to consign "His Dark Materials" to junior-sibling status. Then again, the remaining two books in Pullman's saga will be made into films only if the first is a success. If a boost from "The Lord of the Rings" helps that happen, then maybe a little compromise isn't the end of the world.

© 2007