Pathé announces that principal photography has begun on Bright Star. Written and directed by Oscar® Winner Jane Campion (The Piano, In the Cut), Bright Star will star Abbie Cornish (Elizabeth: The Golden Age, Candy, Somersault) as Fanny Brawne, the muse of the romantic English poet John Keats, who will be played by Ben Whishaw (Brideshead Revisited, I’m not There, Perfume). The film will also feature Paul Schneider (The Assasination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford) as Keats’ best friend, Mr Brown, and Kerry Fox (Shallow Grave, Welcome to Sarajevo) as Fanny’s mother, Mrs Brawne. The Producers are Jan Chapman (The Piano, Lantana) and Caroline Hewitt (Mr Bean’s Holiday, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy).
London 1818: a secret love affair begins between 23 year old English poet, John Keats, and the girl next door, Fanny Brawne, an outspoken student of high fashion.
This unlikely pair began at odds, he thinking her a stylish minx, while she was unimpressed not only by his poetry but also by literature in general.
However, when Fanny heard that Keats was nursing his seriously ill younger brother, her efforts to help touched Keats and when she asked him to teach her about poetry, he agreed. The poetry soon became a romantic remedy that worked not only to sort their differences but also to fuel an impassioned love affair.
When Fanny’s alarmed mother and Keats’ best friend finally awoke to their attachment, the relationship already had an unstoppable momentum. Intensely and helplessly absorbed in each other, the young lovers were swept deeply in to powerful new sensations, “I have the feeling as if I were dissolving”, Keats wrote to her. Together they rode a wave of romantic obsession that only deepened as their troubles mounted.
When Keats fell ill a year later, the two young lovers faced not marriage but separation and a painfully frustrated love. In Keats’ own poignant words, “forever panting and forever young”.
Bright Star is a Pathe, Film Finance Corporation Australia, BBC Films and the UK Film Council’s New Cinema Fund presentation, in association with the New South Wales Film and Television Office and Hopscotch International, of a Jan Chapman Production, in association with Caroline Hewitt.
Pathé will release the film theatrically in the UK and France, Hopscotch in Australia and Pathé International will handle international sales.
Shooting began on location in the UK on 31st March 2008.
