UK NEWS

SCARLETT'S ROCK DREAM WRECKS MARY FILM PLAN

Friday May 23,2008

By Gavin Docherty

A Movie about Mary Queen of Scots faces the axe because of funding problems – and a leading lady who wants to be a rock star.

Hollywood producers have been hit by the weakness of the dollar and are trying to find new backers at the Cannes Film Festival.

And while money is holding up the project, star Scarlett Johansson is looking at offers to join the British music festival circuit, including Glastonbury and T in the Park, to perform songs from her debut album.

Like Braveheart before it, the famous tale of Scottish history was set to be shot largely in Ireland, where tax breaks are more attractive.

It would be sad not to get the band members together

Scarlett Johansson

Scottish Screen had been in talks to win a week of filming in return for £500,000 cash injection from the Lottery Fund.

But even with Scarlett – recently seen in period drama The Other Boleyn Girl – committed to play Scotland’s doomed 16th-century monarch, the team behind the film can’t make the sums add up.

Now Johansson – who has released an album of Tom Waits covers titled Anywhere I Lay My Head – has hinted that she may be playing festival dates this summer.

She said: “It would be sad not to get the band members together.

“But I have horrible stage fright, so it would have to be overcome. People have approached me about playing live in Britain this summer and my answer is: I’ll think about that. But when I do think about it, I start to get really sweaty and uncomfortable around the neck.”

Not half as uncomfortable as she would be playing Queen Mary, who got her head lopped off by the executioner’s axe.

Whether the troubled movie actually happens this year is said to be all down to the success of the producers, who are locked in money negotiations on the French Riviera.

A film festival source said: “The financial uncertainty is so great that it may delay the project or derail it altogether.”