[click for wallpaper]

Colin Firth plays Jan Vermeer in the film The Girl with a Pearl Earring (2003)

Filmed winter 2002/2003 in Luxembourg.
U.K. premiere 7 November 2003
U.S. premiere (in L.A. and N.Y.C.) 12 December 2003 [limited release]

SCREENING/IN COMPETITION:
-- at the Toronto International Film Festival 7 September 9.30 pm, 2003.
-- at the San Sebastian International Film Festival 18-27 September, 2003
-- at the Telluride Film Festival August/September 2003
-- at the London Film Festival 30 October 2003

SCREENPLAY: Olivia Hetreed. Adaption based on of Tracy Chevalier's bestselling book Girl With A Pearl Earring, 1999.

On the verge of womanhood, Griet also contends with the growing attentions both from a local butcher and from Vermeer's patron, the wealthy van Ruijven. And she has to find her way through this new and strange life outside the loving Protestant family she grew up in, now fragmented by accident and death. As Griet becomes part of her master's work, their growing intimacy spreads disruption and jealousy within the ordered household and even - as the scandal seeps out - ripples in the world beyond.

Above. Party at Vermeer's.
Colin Firth seated at far right stars as the realistic painter, and Scarlett Johansson, standing at the far left (with director Peter Webber), plays his famous subject.

From The bookmagazine.com:

• [Author Tracy] Chevalier on how the movie is better than her book: "When I read the screenplay I was bowled over by some of the visual elements. I was even a little jealous of them. There is one moment when the main character, Griet, sits out in a little courtyard and plays with a bowl, reflecting the light off it so that the children around her run and try to catch it. I read that and thought, 'Why didn't I think of that?'"
• How Chevalier feels about cuts made to her book: "I suppose I'm dismayed by how much has to be cut. So many of the subplots have had to be sacrificed in service to the greater good of the main story. That's a shame but it's also understandable."
• Why [director Peter] Webber thinks the novel works on screen: "Tracy's book is actually perfect for adaptation because it's fairly classic - a simple story, and I mean that in the best possible sense. I think movies have to be simple."

From Premiere Magazine, August 2003:
Based on the best-selling 1999 novel by Tracy Chevalier, this fictional story /.../ is the kind of clothes-on love story audiences rarely see these days. "You want them to be together," Johansson says of the unspoken adoration her shy character feels for her married master. Firth admits he was worried about how to portray the mysterious artist-who left behind a few dozen masterpieces, but no real self-portrait-but he'd come to terms with his own artistic limitations: "I could do all the research in the world and never do an average portrait."

First-time director Webber realized he wanted to make the film when he read the script's sexiest scene, in which Vermeer pierces the young girl's ear. "I just thought, 'Oh my God, this is something I haven't seen before,'" he says. Webber would rather please fans of the book than art historians. "It's no surprise to me that there's an awful lot of middle-aged women who loved this novel to death, " he says. "It's a romantic drama. We can't go too highfalutin about it."

From The Express 4 July 2003:
He dons a paint-spattered smock to play the 17th-century Dutch painter Vermeer but Colin Firth is no artist. "I used to paint a bit when I was younger but you could give me a lifetime of lessons and I'd still never be able to produce a Vermeer," he admitted at the opening night of The Three Sisters, starring his English Patient co-star Kristin Scott Thomas, the other night. "Luckily, I just have to look like I can hold a brush and that's about it." However, in preparation, Colin, 42, fondly remembered as wet-shirted Mr Darcy in Pride and Prejudice, has been travelling the globe to familiarise himself with Vermeer's work. "His paintings are all over the world. Hitler even had one. It's in Vienna and it's still got the Nazi swastika stamped on the back. Chilling."

From Premiere Mag, May 2003:
Dressed in a turquoise corduroy suit and sporting a shoulder-length mop of hair, the great Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer (Firth) is in the midst of a turbulent domestic scene with his wife (Davis), who has discovered that the servant girl, Griet (Johansson), has modeled for him, wearing her earrings. Quite a scandal, if you live in 17th-century Delft.

"It's a film about painting," first-time director Webber says on the Luxembourg set of Girl With a Pearl Earring, an adaptation of Tracy Chevalier's 1999 best-selling historical novel that imagines a liaison between the artist and the subject of the eponymous painting. "But it's also about money and sex and obsession and power and repression, watching people who want to shag each other's brains out and not being able to. That's much more interesting than seeing people do it."

Little is known about the Dutch master, who when he died at 43 left behind a wife, 11 children, and 35 paintings, but virtually no record of himself.

Firth's suit and coiffure are the filmmaker's improvisations. Is the hair real?

"No," says the self-deprecating Firth (Bridget Jones's Diary), fondly twisting a strand. "I think this is probably no longer possible."

The actor, who says he fell in love with the painter's work when he saw Young Woman With a Water Jug at the Met several years ago, admits that he has become a bit of Vermeer nerd. But gathering trivia hasn't helped him to demystify the artist. "I would love to know what Vermeer looked like, and what he had for breakfast, and what he sounded like when he spoke," says Firth. "I'm dying of curiosity. But it wouldn't help me get any closer to his pictures."

Johansson (Ghost World), on the other hand, in dyed-blond eyebrows and period clothes looks uncannily like the subject of the famous painting. She also adopted a British accent. "I'm just trying to avoid sounding like a complete asshole," she says. The young actress is relieved to be shooting this understated love story in Europe, and that it's not a typical American production. "It would be completely hellish to have the pressure of putting on a Hollywood ending, or putting in a scene where Vermeer sees Griet washing her breasts." 

From the Globe and Mail, 25 June 2003:
Before she put pen to paper, author Tracy Chevalier sat quietly with the Girl with a Pearl Earring - often called the Dutch Mona Lisa - in the Mauritshuis section of The Hague. ''It's in a small room, and is hung looking across at View of Delft," remembers the 40-year-old writer. "My eyes were like ping-pong balls, darting frantically back and forth from painting to painting. I found it very hard to leave the room."

Chevalier - whose eponymous novel was inspired by Girl with a Pearl Earring by the Flemish painter Johannes Vermeer - recalls sitting for hours in the museum, assessing the portrait of the 17th-Century unknown girl/woman. Years before, Chevalier had bought a poster of the famed art work. And for the better part of a decade the author says she was bemused and bewildered by Vermeer's enigmatic subject. Was she 12? Or 22? Where did she come from? What would she do with her life? Why was the girl, turned three-quarters around, looking at the painter in that way, tempting on one hand, but also timid.

It was these questions that motivated Chevalier to write Girl with a Pearl Earring. A book that Chevalier says she knew was "half-decent" when she was finished writing the final chapter in the fall of 1998. But never dreamed would take off, largely through word-of-mouth, to sell more than 2-million copies.

In November, Chevalier's novel becomes a film, starring the British actor Colin Firth (Bridget Jones Diary, Shakespeare in Love) as Vermeer and Hollywood newcomer Scarlett Johansson (The Horse Whisperer, An American Rhapsody) as the mysterious "girl," whom Chevalier named Griet, and fictionalized as a maid who worked for the painter, and eventually became his muse.

"Even after all that time in the museum, I felt I didn't get enough of her. I couldn't get her," says Chevalier, who was recently at the Banff Television Festival to talk about her experience transitioning a novel into a screenplay. 'I couldn't get her. It's like an itch that can't be scratched. The expression on the girl's face is a very ambiguous one. It's impossible to pin down what she's thinking. I couldn't get the thought out of my head that she had a lot of growing up to do. So as much as anything else, I guess my book - and the upcoming film - is a coming-of-age story." /.../

"Every writer dreams about their book being made into a film. I had hopes for this because it's a very visual story, but I was also very nervous and somewhat ambivalent because so many books that become movies fall flat," adds Chevalier.

Shot last November in Luxembourg, the film was originally to star Ralph Fiennes and Kate Hudson. Kirsten Dunst was also reportedly interested in the role, but all fell through because of a lack of financing. As the book took off, the money for the film eventually firmed up. Chevalier says she's ecstatic with the actors who are playing the leading roles, adding that Griet is a tough character to play since her role actually has very little dialogue. "It's a very visual book, and a very visual film," the writer says. "Griet does a lot of watching, and very little talking. Scarlett plays it perfectly."

At the Banff session, Hetreed described the film as a domestic thriller. The first-time director Peter Webber calls it a movie about painting. But with a twist. "It's also about money and sex and obsession and power and repression watching people who want to shag each other's brains out and not being able to," he said recently. "That's much more interesting than seeing people do it."

Chevalier agrees, adding that it was intriguing to watch the actors inhabit her characters, and give them a life of their own. "Colin and Scarlett are very different from each other in how they approached their roles. Colin became a complete Vermeer egghead. He travelled all over Europe to see Vermeer's paintings. He took painting lessons and learned how to make his own brushes and grind his own paint. He was very engaged in the script."

Very little is known of Vermeer, who died at 43, bankrupt, and leaving behind a wife, 11 children and 35 paintings. Chevalier says Firth, 42, read everything he could lay his hands on about the artist. "And I thought, yes!" Because he became obsessive in a way that I believe Vermeer would have been obsessive about his paintings.

Girl with a Pearl Earring, she recalls, was her fastest book, and perhaps the easiest to write. She started it in February, 1998, and finished the following October, working full-time. "Two weeks later I had my son. There's nothing like a fixed biological deadline to focus the mind! I don't think I'll ever write anything so quickly again." When she wrote this book, Chevalier bought some linseed oil (mixed with pigment to make paint) and "left the bottle open as I was writing so that I could smell what they would have smelled."

From The Express, 18 September 2002: It is a great day for fans of Colin Firth. The actor, forever remembered as wet-shirted Mr Darcy in Pride And Prejudice, will shortly be back in period breeches in Girl With A Pearl Earring. Colin, 42, currently to be seen in the film of Oscar Wilde's The Importance Of Being Earnest, is to appear as the 17th-century Dutch painter Vermeer in the film version of Tracy Chevalier's bestselling book./.../