Philip Kaufman fights grief to make 'Hemingway'
Russell Yip / The Chronicle
Phil Kaufman, director of films such as, "The Right Stuff" and "Henry and June," has a new HOB Film premiering at the Cannes Film Festival called, "Hemingway and Gellhorn," starring Clive Owen and Nicole Kidman. Kaufman is seen in his San Francisco, Calif., home on Friday, May 4, 2012.
Philip Kaufman met Nicole Kidman after the worst month of his life.
In town for just a day, Kidman was to speak at the groundbreaking for a center in the Presidio dedicated to stopping violence against women and children. It was early January 2010, and Kidman, on her first visit to the city, was representing the U.N. Development Fund for Women, for which she is a roving ambassador. Kaufman had just lost his wife and creative partner, and had hardly left his house.
Rose Kaufman had been fighting cancer for years, and everyone who knew her husband understood what a loss he had suffered. The two had been together since they'd met as undergraduates at the University of Chicago, in 1958, and married the following year. After all this time, Kaufman still tells the tale on his website: "After getting into a spirited argument about a movie they had just seen, Philip Kaufman fell madly in love with Rose, and a lifetime of filmmaking and family life began."
Kaufman went on to make 13 films, among them "The Right Stuff," "The Unbearable Lightness of Being," "Henry and June" and "Quills." From the beginning, Rose was always there: as collaborator, frequent co-writer, occasional extra. Once their son, Peter, was ! born, in 1960, the three were an exceptionally tight unit, on location and off.
"My world was always pretty much the three of us," Kaufman says. It was Peter's wife, Christine Pelosi, who suggested attending the event in the Presidio. Her mother, Nancy Pelosi, was one of the speakers. Actress and director Joan Chen, a friend of Kaufman's, was going to read. It would get her father-in-law out of the house, Christine thought, and not least, he could meet Nicole Kidman.
"Someone said to me, 'That's Phil Kaufman over there,' " Kidman remembers. "I could see the pain in his face, his grief. Because of my relationship with my husband (country singer Keith Urban), I couldn't imagine what he was going through after so many years with her."
When Christine introduced the two, "I held his hand and said, 'How are you?' " Kidman told me. " 'Not good.' It was one of those meetings with nothing superficial, very immediate and deep."
"She'd heard about Rose," Kaufman says. "I just remember this loooong, silent look that we had, very penetrating." With others clamoring to speak with the star, it was a short conversation, but Kidman managed to tell him, "I'd love to work with you."
Kaufman hadn't directed a movie since "Twisted," with Ashley Judd and Samuel L. Jackson, in 2004. But even after moving his office from North Beach to the basement of his home, in Cow Hollow, to stay closer to Rose, he'd been working on lots of projects. "We're never not working," says Peter Kaufman, who produces his father's movies. "I feel like we've made three times as many films, because you can work for years on a project that doesn't get made."
Perhaps farthest along, as Christine Pelosi knew, was a script centered on the turbulent, globe-trotting relationship of Ernest Hemingway and his third wife, the foreign correspondent and writer Martha Gellhorn, who together and separately covered the Spanish Civil War, civil war in China, and Europe during World War II. ! During m uch of their time together, they lived in Cuba.
"I didn't offer to show Nicole the script," says Philip Kaufman. "It was still sort of a hidden project. But two days later, she called. 'I've read the script and I want to do it.' " "No matter how long it takes," Kidman told him, "I'm in."
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