The London Film Festival announced today that it will open in October with the world premiere of Wes Anderson’s ‘The Fantastic Mr Fox’ – a stop-motion animated version of Roald Dahl’s classic of children’s literature.
Anderson, the director of ‘The Royal Tenenbaums’ and ‘The Darjeeling Limited’, made the film here in London, shooting all the animation at Three Mills Studios in east London.
This year’s festival will take place from October 14 to 29 and will, as ever, bring hundreds of film premieres – and big-name guests – from all over the world to London, kicking off with Anderson's latest on the night of October 14. It’s expected that the film’s voice cast of George Clooney, Meryl Streep and Jason Schwartzman will all attend the Leicester Square opening of the festival.
It’s a real boon for the event to be opening with a world premiere of such a highly anticipated film, although some Anderson fans might be disappointed that another of his cast members, his regular collaborator Bill Murray, isn’t slated to appear. Last time Murray pitched up to a film festival, it was to introduce ‘The Darjeeling Limited’ at Venice in 2007, where he entertained a rapt press conference with tales of driving a golf cart through Stockholm in the middle of the night and getting stopped by the Swedish police who suspected he was drunk. Sadly, there's no such luck in store for Londoners.
The news that ‘The Fantastic Fox’ will open the festival is the first taste of this year's revamped festival. Earlier this year, the LFF accepted £1.8 million of funding from the UK Film Council on the condition that it become more international and shout a little louder to make itself heard and, crucially, seen by audiences across London. As such, we’re told that the closing night film will also be a world premiere, while the festival also plans to move its awards ceremony from before the screening of the closing night film to a special slot all of its own. Moreover, the festival is looking to boost its international profile by inviting more journalists from across the world than ever before. No doubt more innovations will be announced over the coming months.
Finally – but happily – we can also confirm that Time Out will again partner with the festival to bring you a very special preview screening of one of the year’s best films in world cinema (all will be revealed here very soon) – which will be attended and introduced by its award-winning director. We're sworn to silence, but all we'll say at this stage is that we're thrilled to be putting our name to such a terrific film by one of the world's greatest living directors. We will also once again be supporting the European Cinema section of the festival and hosting a series of discussion events at BFI Southbank over the course of the 15-day event.
Let's close with a guessing game: which movie will festival director Sandra Hebron pick for her closing night film?
We already know it's a world premiere, so that rules out titles which are strongly suspected to play at Venice or Toronto, such as Werner Herzog's new 'Bad Lieutenant' film with Nicolas Cage, John Hillcoat's 'The Road' with Viggo Mortensen and Steven Soderbergh's 'The Informant' with Matt Damon.
So, we've applied rigorous mathematical formulae to the rest of the major films due for release late this year or early 2010, and we believe that one of these films will be the closing night film of this year's LFF:
'Nine' from Rob Marshall ('Chicago') – a musical loosely based on Fellini's '8-and-a-half', starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Penélope Cruz.
'Where the Wild Things Are' – Spike Jonze's adaptation of Maurice Sendak's wondrous and much-loved children's book.
'Sherlock Holmes' – Guy Ritchie's update of Arthur Conan Doyle's detective stories, starring Robert Downey Junior as Holmes and Jude Law as Dr Watson.
'Nowhere Boy' – Sam Taylor-Wood's debut feature, a drama about the teenage life of John Lennon, is being released in the UK on Christmas Day. Could it be unveiled first to a London audience as the festival's closing night film?
'A Christmas Carol' – Robert Zemeckis's animated version of Charles Dickens's story would make it an animation double for the festival after event opener 'Fantastic Mr Fox'. But is Zemeckis's big commerical hope simply too big a film to close the LFF? It's released on November 6, a week after the festival ends, so maybe there will be another special slot for it at the event, just as there was for 'Quantum of Solace' last year?
But, then again, we could be entirely wide of the mark. We'll have to wait until next week to see whether our predictions are prophetic or pathetic.
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