How Philip Kaufman made HBO's 'Hemingway'

Hbo

The stars: Nicole Kidman and Clive Owen play the title characters in HBO's historical romance "Hemingway & Gellhorn," which San Francisco filmmaker Philip Kaufman directed using a variety of locations in the Bay Area. This scene was shot in the Green Room at San Francisco's Veterans Building.

Once Philip Kaufman met Nicole Kidman, in January 2010, the process of getting "Hemingway & Gellhorn" developed sped up like a car chase in a silent movie.

It must have been an exceedingly strange time for Kaufman and his producer son, Peter - losing wife Rose only a month earlier, living in the fog of grief and loss, dealing with the giant task of adjusting to life without her. Philip Kaufman could hardly focus on the script he'd been revising with his friend Jerry Stahl. And yet HBO wanted the film, a good start had been made on the screenplay, and he had his Gellhorn.

Now Kaufman and Stahl started seriously reworking the script. HBO needed to see more than a screenplay, though. Kaufman had to offer "proof of concept" - a short film illustrating just how "Hemingway & Gellhorn" would incorporate newly filmed material with archival footage. Kaufman called on longtime local colleagues such as location scout Pat Ranahan, who began scouring the Bay Area for sites that could stand in for Spain, Key West, Cuba, Finland, Hong Kong, China, New York and London.

In Kaufman's basement office, film editor Rob Bonz began compiling filmed segments plus archival scenes from earlier Kaufman movies. Chris Morley, a visual effects genius from Tippett Studio in Berkeley, beg! an worki ng with advanced digital techniques to "nest" the modern-day actors in the archival footage in ways far superior to those of the past.

Working into the early hours of the morning, Kaufman and Stahl ramped up the film's romantic element and expanded the settings. "We took a sharp turn and created what amounted to a completely different script," says Kaufman. "With Jerry, I was able to develop a movie that I wanted to do." (Barbara Turner, who wrote the script originally brought to Kaufman, shares the screenwriting credit with Stahl, who did all the work on the final draft.)

Circulating the script

At that point, Kaufman sent the script to a close friend, "just to see what he thought." An entertainment lawyer and psychotherapist in Los Angeles, Barry Hirsch represents, among others, Francis Ford Coppola, Sean Penn and Clive Owen. Hirsch told Kaufman, "I think this is something Clive would like."

"So I got a call from Clive Owen in London," Kaufman relates, "and he says, 'I just read the script, and it's a stormin' script' - he used the word stormin'. Just like Nicole, he wanted in. Now we had to work out the scheduling."

"It looked a bit like it wasn't gonna happen," says Owen, "because I was committed to another film. It looked like I would miss a great opportunity, one of those odd rare films in your career. Then Phil called and said, 'If we waited, would you give me your word you won't mess me about?' "

By then, Kaufman had borrowed a screening room at the Letterman Digital Center and shown the proof-of-concept film to a group from HBO. Although Rose was gone now, Kaufman still wanted to shoot the film close to home. He knew the Bay Area could stand in for any location needed and that the local film technicians are unexcelled. (A writer for the Los Angeles Times has already called San Francisco and environs "the real star" of the film.) HBO agreed that Kaufman could film the entire movie here and provided a $15 million to $18 million budget. With the stars' schedules! , filmin g could begin less than a year later, in February 2011.

Kaufman lined up more local crew members and several actors he'd worked with in the past, such as David Strathairn, Robert Duvall and Brooke Adams. He called on friends, among them local actors Joan Chen and Peter Coyote; Adams' husband, Tony Shalhoub; Larry Tse, who owns the House restaurant, in North Beach; and his wife, Angela Tse, who is Kaufman's secretary. Small parts went to people like the Tses' young niece, Nicole Tse; Sara Kliben, the casting director; and Octavio Kaufman, Peter's now-12-year-old son from his first marriage.