Cameo Role for Gillian
Posted at 2:56 PM (PDT) on Monday, October 11, 2004

Variety
Oct. 11, 2004
By Adam Dawtrey

'Shandy' starts

Jeremy Northam will play Winterbottom and James Fleet will play Eaton in their next movie, an adaptation of Laurence Sterne's 18th-century comic masterpiece "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman."

Steve Coogan will play, um, Steve Coogan, as well as Tristram Shandy and his father, Walter. Former "X-Files" star Gillian Anderson has a cameo as herself.

Confused? You should be. "Tristram Shandy" is arguably the most unfilmable novel in the canon of English literature, and Winterbottom's typically bold solution is to make a movie about the difficulty of making the movie. The script by Frank Cottrell Boyce flicks back and forth between the 18th century and the hapless efforts of the 21st-century filmmakers.

The original book is ostensibly the memoir of a country parson, but actually a brilliant exercise in the fine art of digression, crammed with literary jokes (a black page when Shandy's dog dies, print that dissolves into squiggles). As Shandy tries to tell his life story, he's constantly distracted, interrupted and diverted by his family and household, inadvertently revealing far more about himself than any conventional autobiography.

The rest of the cast includes Rob Brydon, Dylan Moran, Kelly Macdonald, Stephen Fry, Naomie Harris, Shirley Henderson, Ian Hart, Keeley Hawes and Kieran O'Brien. When the filmmakers (Northam and Fleet, remember?) need a Hollywood star to get their project financed, in comes Anderson.

In fact, the movie -- the real movie, that is -- is funded by Newmarket (taking North American rights), BBC Films, Prescience and the East Midlands Media Initiative. The Works is handling international sales.

None of these financiers is impersonated in the film, although Winterbottom did try to attract backers by offering them the chance to play themselves. That's true to the spirit of Sterne, who tried unsuccessfully to raise the cash to publish his book by auctioning off its dedication.

Sterne ended up paying for publication himself -- and, with unintended symmetry, Winterbottom and Eaton had to invest some equity of their own to complete their funding jigsaw. Shooting starts Oct. 11.