Reach for the stars

Though Jez Butterworth admits his first film 'didn't work', Nicole Kidman is heading the celebrity cast of his second, Birthday Girl. What's the secret of his pulling power?

FOR a young writer/ director to hire stars such as Nicole Kidman, Harold Pinter and Ray Winstone to perform his work could suggest overconfidence, but Jez Butterworth is touchingly grateful that such luminaries want to collaborate with him. In his latest project, the film Birthday Girl, the Hollywood idol Kidman is joined by the French film director and actor Matthieu Kassovitz (Amlie), as well as the rising British actor Ben Chaplin (Game On; The Truth About Cats and Dogs).

Butterworth says he was unfazed by the thought of giving direction to any of them, although he admits: "I knew Matthieu would be thinking, 'I wouldn't do it like that.' But if as a director you let that interfere, you would make a terrible film."

In Birthday Girl (opening on Friday), Kidman plays a Russian bride found on the internet by Chaplin's commuter-belt bank worker. He speaks no Russian, she speaks no English. Kassovitz and Vincent Cassel (star of Kassovitz's The Crimson Rivers) play her "cousins" - in reality two con men, with Chaplin as their target.

What was it like working with Kidman? "She's sweet and silly and tremendous fun. If she hadn't got along with anyone on set it could have been a nightmare, but she and Ben hit it off immediately.

"She makes it enormously easy because she can only act if the writing is true, so I knew something was wrong in the script if she suddenly started acting badly. We'd be on take 12 or 13 and she wasn't getting it. You know the problem is with the script, not her - you make a change and she's got it in one or two takes." Butterworth, a 33-yearold-north Londoner, burst on to the scene in 1995 with his first play Mojo, a witty and vibrant story about greed and amorality set in 1950s Soho.

He was the first writer since John Osborne and Look Back in Anger to make his writing debut on the main stage at the Royal Court, and everybody expected great things on the strength of it. But the film of the play (starring Pinter) didn't set the movie world alight, a fact that Butterworth acknowledges with honest self-appraisal.

"I was 27 and someone wanted me to make my first film. The only answer to a request like that is, 'Yes.' The film of Mojo has good bits in it but doesn't work overall; I screwed up the group dynamic in the adaptation and muddied things that should have been made clear to the audience."

His second play, The Night Heron, starred Winstone. When it was performed at the Royal Court earlier this year it gained mostly good reviews. There had been a sevenyear hiatus between his first and second plays, caused mainly by the long gestation period of Birthday Girl, which Butterworth co-wrote with his brother Tom.

"We had the idea in 1994 but didn't write the script until 1998. We shot it the following year and returned to it in 2000 as Nicole's schedule was so tight. Originally, we only had 32 days with her. As we went over our shooting schedule we had to wait 11 months until she became available again after Moulin Rouge."

Birthday Girl, like much of Butterworth's work, is a family affair.

The second youngest of a close, large Irish family who grew up in St Albans (where Birthday Girl is set), he writes plays alone, but so far has collaborated with at least one of his brothers on all his film work.

He co-wrote Mojo and Birthday Girl and a couple of other films with Tom; Steve co-produced Birthday Girl; and Jez has just completed another film script with younger brother John Henry.

"It's done on a really ad hoc basis, but if you share a sensibility with people, how wonderful that you can work together."

Butterworth, with or without family involvement, won't leave it so long before producing his next play, which is scheduled to open at the Royal Court in February. "The delay between the first and second plays wasn't deliberate," he says.

"I wrote the first draft of The Night Heron in early 1999, which would have been only four years after, but circumstances being what they were I know now that I wouldn't want to leave things that long again. I'm 33, I know what I want to do and want to get on with it."

GETTING on with it almost certainly means a foray into Hollywood.

Does Butterworth see himself as part of the hugely successful Britishtheatreto-LA migration, a group that includes Stephen Daldry, Sam Mendes and Nicholas Hytner?

"They are hugely talented directors; I see myself more as a writer who is learning to direct films," he says.

But that lineage and Butterworth's star-pulling power may mean that at some point he has to make a choice between theatre and film. "I know," he says, "and I'm not looking forward to it. It's like, 'Which of your children would you like to see run over?' I just love doing both and it's nice to go from one to the other."

There might, however, be a clue to where his heart truly lies when Butterworth remarks that, unlike film, "theatre is done on nothing and everybody is so nice.

"When the money comes in, so do the talentless pricks."

Jez Butterworth: "I'm 33. I know what I want to do and want to get on with it" Nicole Kidman plays a Russian internet bride in Butterworth's Birthday Girl: "she's sweet and silly and tremendous fun"

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