The Dreaming

Pic — based on the book by Neil Gaiman, and toplining the voice talent of Dakota Fanning — follows a young girl who walks through a secret door in her new home and discovers an alternate version of her life.

Laika supervising director Henry Selick adapted the tome for the bigscreen and will co-helm with Mike Cachuela.

Selick’s previous directing credits include “James and the Giant Peach” and “The Nightmare Before Christmas.”

Pandemonium Films topper Bill Mechanic is producing with Laika’s Mary Sandell.

Alt rockers They Might Be Giants are penning songs for the pic.

“This distribution agreement is an integral step in the evolution of Laika Entertainment as a major force in the global feature film animation marketplace,” said the unit’s prexy and CEO Dale Wahl.

Headed by James Schamus, Focus’ slate already includes Woody Allen’s “Scoop,” Allen Coulter’s “Hollywoodland” and David Cronenberg’s “Eastern Promises.”

Focus Features will distribute Coraline, the first theatrical release from Knight’s Portland animation studio, Laika Entertainment. The companies plan to announce the deal today at the Cannes Film Festival in France.

The partnership gives Laika a way to put its first movie in theaters and an experienced partner to help market the picture, both essential for the independent studio that Nike founder Knight acquired in 2003. No decision has been made on whether Focus Features will distribute future Laika films

Focus is known for producing offbeat movies that win critical attention but often play to niche markets. Recent pictures include “Brokeback Mountain,” “The Constant Gardener” and “Lost in Translation.” Focus is owned by NBC Universal.

Coraline, now in the early stages of production in Laika’s Northwest Portland offices, is an adaptation of a spooky 2002 children’s novel by Neil Gaiman. Due in theaters in mid-2008, it is the tale of a young girl who wanders into a mirror world, where eerie reflections of her parents seek to imprison her.

The dark, complex nature of the film contrasts with much of the lighter fare in popular animation and makes the project “a little bit of a risk,” said Dale Wahl, a former Nike executive whom Knight hired last year to be Laika’s chief executive. He said Laika picked Focus in part because it has a track record of success with edgy films.

“Focus has shown over the films that they’ve done an ability to handle that risk,” Wahl said.

Focus’ relationship with NBC Universal will also help Coraline get broad distribution, Wahl said, and could eventually steer the film to broadcast and cable networks that NBC owns. Focus will not help finance the film, Wahl said, but will share the marketing costs.

Coraline is being directed by Henry Selick, Laika’s supervising director. Child star Dakota Fanning will voice the title character, and rock duo They Might Be Giants will provide songs for the movie.

After acquiring the former Vinton Studios in 2003, Knight renamed the business Laika and laid out an ambitious plan to build a major animation business in Oregon and finance the movies with the personal fortune he built at Nike. Knight’s son, Travis, works for Laika as an animator and serves on its board.

In addition to Selick, who directed the 1993 animated musical “The Nightmare Before Christmas,” Knight has hired experienced animators and executives from Pixar Animation Studios and elsewhere to help launch his company. Laika plans to blend the stop-motion animation Vinton Studios was known for with newly developed computer effects.

After Coraline, Laika’s next picture is scheduled to be an original work written by Laika animator Jorgen Klubien, tentatively called “Jack & Ben’s Animated Adventure.”

Laika has about 170 employees but expects to hire as many as 400 more animators, software engineers and technical experts in the next two years as film production ramps up. The company is seeking larger facilities in the Portland area to house its growing staff.

Nearly all the major Hollywood studios have animated films in the pipeline, and Disney agreed this year to pay $7.4 billion to buy Pixar. Film critic and animation historian Leonard Maltin said the competition has opened up the animation business to new entrants rather than closed it off.

“Whereas Disney used to have the only brand name in the business, the field is now wide open,” said Maltin, co-author of “Of Mice and Magic: A History of American Animated Cartoons.”

Viewers now judge animated films on their merits, Maltin said, not on their studio pedigree. And he said Knight has done a good job staffing Laika, which bodes well for quality.

“Henry Selick’s a very talented guy. There’s no reason not to be completely optimistic,” Maltin said.

Speaking Tuesday, in advance of the deal between Laika and Focus, Maltin said marketing an animated film requires a longer campaign than many Hollywood studios are accustomed to.

“Even though the film may not be finished, you have to have a finished trailer out months ahead of time,” Maltin said. “You want to start to build that awareness long before the movie shows up on theater screens.”

That requires juggling the production schedule, Maltin said, sometimes to the filmmakers’ frustration. But it’s vital, he said, especially to a studio starting fresh.

Tall, dark and handsome, he’s recently been hanging out with Angelina Jolie on the set of the film Beowulf, for which he co-wrote the script. Despite all these credentials he is, like most parents, totally embarrassing to his children.

“I’m really looking forward to being a grandparent so I stop embarrassing my kids,” Gaiman says in his tidy English accent.

“My grandparents were never embarrassing, whereas parents can embarrass you just by acknowledging you on the street when your friends were around.”

Even a divine father can be embarrassing. Just ask Fat Charlie Nancy, the protagonist in Gaiman’s latest novel, Anansi Boys, which made its debut on the New York Times bestseller list late last year.

Although his dad is the West African spider god Anansi - embodied by a hip old black man in yellow gloves and a fedora - the young accountant finds him mortifyingly embarrassing. When Anansi dies at a karaoke night, Fat Charlie learns he has a long-lost brother, Spider, who inherited their father’s supernatural powers.

Soon, the charming brother is on the scene and ruining Fat Charlie’s life. Fat Charlie seeks help from some elderly neighbours who use voodoo from the old country to get rid of the annoying brother. That, of course, is where the real trouble starts.

The Anansi mythology originated in West Africa, but soon spread to Jamaica, the West Indies and the southern states of the US (where Anansi stories are often retold as Brer Rabbit tales).

In Gaiman’s story, patois and Jamaican accents are used to great effect, lending an extra dose of cool to these characters.

Did Gaiman worry about stepping out of his cultural territory and playing around with Afro-Caribbean folklore?

“Absolutely. But if I am only allowed to write stories in which the protagonist and the folklore are those of third-generation English Jews who have gone to live in America, my stories will get very boring very quickly,” he says. “But I am telling the story of my people, in that my people are humanoids living on this planet.” Gaiman did his best to get the Jamaican accents and references right, but his efforts were lost on some readers.

“What fascinated me was the amount of people who assumed that because these women were in Florida, they were little old white ladies and somehow I couldn’t work out a little old white lady accent,” he says.

“People explained that the food I’d described at the funeral was totally wrong and in fact I’d made it sound as though it was a Jamaican funeral. It was strange how it just wouldn’t enter people’s heads that it actually was a Jamaican funeral.”

Anansi Boys is the latest in a string of successes for 45-year old Gaiman. Born in Porchester in southern England, he grew up reading Tolkien and C.S. Lewis.

While working as a journalist in the 1980s - his biography of Duran Duran is something of a collectors item - he collaborated with the fantasy author Terry Pratchett on the apocalyptic comic novel Good Omens. The book spent 17 weeks on The Sunday Times bestseller list.

Nowadays, Gaiman’s output includes novels, graphic novels, poems and songs. In 2002, American Gods won the Hugo Award for the best fantasy work. But he’s probably best known for his comic series The Sandman, a sophisticated, artistically ambitious work, which garnered a loyal following during its nine years of publication. Ten volumes of the comic are still in print. The series’ hero is Dream, the “immortal anthropomorphic personification of dreams” who also goes by the names, Morpheus, Oneiros, Lord Shaper and the Prince of Stories. Confused? Gaiman himself has summarised the plot as: “The king of dreams learns one must change or die and then makes his decision.”

What is clear is that Gaiman was writing about magic long before Harry Potter made it mainstream. “In the old days, if there was anyone in the signing line over 50 it was somebody’s mum,” he says. Now, he says, there’s more diversity among his fans because more people are reading books in general. “I think that’s because people are storytelling animals and people like stories. One of the things that has got people reading again is the rise of children’s fiction which, through the ’80s and early ’90s, had practically been driven into the ground,” he says. “Most children’s fiction seemed to be rather gloomy and set on council estates and the main character’s brother had problems with heroin, and those were the cheery ones. And they wondered why kids weren’t reading! Then Harry Potter came along, stories where the biggest thing was wanting to know what happened next.”

Despite his growing army of fans, to his kids, Gaiman remains an embarrassing old fart with a bad haircut. At least his two daughters and son can feel relieved that their father has so far resisted his urge to dress like Anansi.

“When I was in New Orleans in ‘93, I got to go to the French Quarter, where you run into these little old black guys wearing bright yellow gloves and red fedoras. It seemed natty, it was a sense of style that I in my leather jacket and black jeans could only dream of,” he says.

“I thought, ‘If only I was a 70-year-old black man called Blind Melon Goodbody, I could wear a hat like that’. I mean, they wore spats for God’s sake. Who wears spats?”

With a green parasol resting on her shoulder and a stunning lilac ballgown covering her curves, the blonde actress was more lady of the manor than London It-Girl. Her eye-catching costume didn’t look out of place against the backdrop of Castle Coombe in Wiltshire, however, as the pretty village is one of Britain’s most historically authentic.

The picturesque town, which is centred around a 14th-century marketplace, has played host to the Britons, Saxons and the Normans down through the centuries. In recent years it has become accustomed to welcoming more modern visitors, as it’s frequently used for filming period dramas. St Andrew’s Church, which dates back to the 12th century and features a 500-year-old clock, is among the sites making it a favourite with location scouts.

National Trust homes in Arlington Row will feature in a blockbuster called Stardust, starring Robert De Niro and Michelle Pfeiffer.

The film is a fantasy set in a make-believe, magical land.

Cameras rolled at the picturesque 14th century terrace of Cotswold stone cottages overlooking the river.

The homes are a huge tourist attraction and one of the area’s most photographed scenes.

But they were given the old-fashioned treatment with props including milk churns and sacks of grain.

TV aerials, modern guttering, signs and paving were disguised for the film, which is believed to be set in the 1890s.

Gallery owner Diane Breen said: “They have put in an amazing amount of work.

“There’s even a fake door that slots in front of one of the National Trust doors which makes it look even older.”

Bibury Trout Farm manager Ian Peters was out with his camera.

“We didn’t see any of the stars but we’ll be waiting with bated breath to see the film,” he said.

“They were here for three days and used our car park. They had snow on the cottages’ rooftops and filmed a lot at night. It was dramatic.

“People didn’t do much business because of all the film crew vehicles - there must have been about 100.”

Over the past four days, straw and turf has been laid on the roads, and shutters added outside buildings to transform the village into a film set.

Miss Miller, on-off girlfriend of Jude Law, arrived on her fourth day of filming just after 1pm where she was quickly ushered to a private booth.

The village deemed “the prettiest village in England” has been cordoned off and security guards and police are on guard until filming stops.

Leading man Charlie Cox, who has featured in The Merchant of Venice and Casanova, was seen filming from early morning yesterday.

The film boasts an all-star cast including Robert De Niro, Michelle Pfeiffer and Claire Danes and although rumoured to be on set, Mr De Niro was nowhere to be seen yesterday.

Over 200 extras were needed for the film and actors were selected from the village to take part.

Mac Turner, of Castle Combe, was filming yesterday as an extra but was whisked away before he could talk to the Gazette.

Castle Combe Parish Council chairman Adrian Bishop said: “I believe there are quite a number of extras taken from the village and they were all bussed up to London to audition.

“It’s very exciting for Castle Combe and the village has really been transformed.

Sienna plays the romantic interest, Victoria, in the film which is directed by Matthew Vaughn, the husband of supermodel Claudia Schiffer and director of Layer Cake.

Mr Vaughn said: “I am delighted to be able to work with such a stellar cast.

“I’ve looked forward to once again shooting in the UK.”

Stardust was written by Vaughn and his writing partner Jane Goldman and is adapted from the 1997 award-winning novel written by Neil Gaiman.

Stardust, is a fantasy, adventure love story.

In the sleepy English village of Wall a young man named Tristian, Charlie Cox, goes on a quest to win the heart of his beloved, Victoria, Sienna Miller.

His journey in search of a falling star Yvaine, Clarie Danes, takes him into a magical world where he faces a witch, Lamia played by Michelle Pfeiffer, and a pirate, Captain Shakespeare, Robert De Niro.

Filming is expected to finish by Friday, weather permitting.

The “Wiltshire Mecca of Picturesque Villages” has been chosen to play the part of the sleepy English village of Wall in the fantasy-adventure-love story Stardust. But, despite it’s obvious charms and English good looks, it will be battling for screen time with some of the biggest names in Hollywood.

Sienna at Castle Combe (Realplayer)

Among those signed up, for the fantasy romp, are Robert De Niro, Michelle Pfeiffer, Claire Danes, Claudia Schaffer, Charlie Cox and Sienna Miller.

Plus at the helm will be super-model Schaffer’s husband, and Layer Cake director, Mathew Vaughn.

Based on the critically rated novel by Neil Gaiman, the action kicks-off in the village of Wall, played by Castle Combe, “a countryside town bordering on a magical land”.

It’s from this sleepy hamlet that the young lad Tristian (Charlie Cox) heads off on a quest to win over the affections of local lass, Vicotria (Sienna Miller) by tracking down a falling star.

But as he journeys through this magical world he comes face to face with the witch, Lamia (Michelle Pfeiffer) and a pirate, Captain Shakespeare (Robert De Niro).

With a number of suitably dark and mysterious places all vying for a place in the adult fairytale… Castle Combe managed to land the role of the village of Wall.

With filming, scheduled to run from Sunday May 7th for a week, Castle Combe has undergone a bit of a make-over and emerged looking even more olde-worlde than usual (if that’s possible). The main road, for instance, running through the lower village, has been turfed over and some of the already TV-aerial free cottages have had French style shutters added.

Plus over the last few days Sienna Miller has been on set, in period costume, taking advantage of the sunny weather for some exterior shots.

A fleet of cars with blacked-out windows descended on the Charlton Mead Lane Industrial Estate as the top British actor turned out to film scenes for his new movie, Stardust, at a specialist prop and location warehouse Keeley Hire Film and Television.

The fantasy flick, being written and directed by Layer Cake director Matthew Vaughn - husband of Supermodel Claudia Schiffer - also stars Robert De Niro, Michelle Pfeiffer, Peter O’Toole, Charlie Cox, Billy Whitelaw and Sienna Miller.Publicists for the A-list project confirmed that Gervais, 45, had been filming in Hoddesdon and that Matthew Vaughn, 33, was also on set.

“They were there to film scenes for Stardust, that’s all we can say,” said a spokesman.

The film is being made by Paramount Pictures and is due to be released in June 2007.

The majority of filming for the movie is taking place at Pinewood Studios in Bucks and also on location in Iceland and the Isle of Skye.

Stardust is a fantasy romance adventure set in the sleepy English village of Wall and charts the adventures of young man named Tristian (Charlie Cox) who goes on a quest to win the heart of his beloved Victoria (Sienna Miller).

Although only a small part of the flick is being filmed in Hoddesdon, curious workers in Charlton Mead Lane were lapping up the action of the day.

Businesses have been told they will get compensation from the filmmakers when a cinema blockbuster is shot on the cobbles of the medieval thoroughfare.

But they hope to reap even more financial reward from the film, because its exposure on the big screen could draw more tourists to Norwich. As reported in the Evening News movie bosses picked Elm Hill as perfect location for a market street in the upcoming film Stardust, described as a grown-up fairy tale. Top Tinsel Town names including Michelle Pfeiffer, Robert de Niro and Claire Danes will appear in the film alongside British talent Sienna Miller.

Businesses are expected to close for one or two days of filming, proposed for June 5. Philip Goodbody of The Dormouse antique bookshop said: “We won’t really know whether it is a great thing for the street until the film comes out.

“Although I have not seen any written contract I understand that there will be some compensation for closing the business while the film crew are working.”

At 29a Elm Hill, Duncan McKeowan, owner of The Games Room, said he was looking forward to the street getting a bit of the limelight. He said: “I think it is good news.”

Pensioners Leonard and Barbara Stevenson moved to Elm Hill 48 years ago and think the arrival of Stardust is great news.

Mr Stevenson agreed: “It is fairly quiet down this street so it will be nice to have them filming here. I don’t mind at all,” he said.

Collett’s Curios owner Paul Collett, said he has been based on Elm Hill for a year and but will not be about on the day of filming: “If this film is a success it may help bring people in to the street.”

Location manager Emma Pill was not prepared to comment on whether any big stars would be coming to the street.

Elm Hill, in Norwich, has been chosen above scores of streets viewed across Europe as one of the locations for Stardust, to be directed by Layer Cake’s Matthew Vaughn.

The film will star a host of Hollywood hotshots including Sienna Miller and Claire Danes as well as Pfeiffer and de Niro.

But location manager Emma Pill could only confirm the film’s lead actor Charlie Cox, who plays hero Tristan Thorn, would be needed in the city, adding that Pfeiffer, de Niro and Miller would definitely not be shooting there.

Vaughn, who is married to supermodel Claudia Schiffer and lives at Coldham Hall, Suffolk, is adapting Neil Gaiman’s prize-winning novel of the same name into what is predicted to be one of the biggest films of 2007.

Elm Hill will play the part of a town in the kingdom of Stormhold, where the protagonist is trying to capture an elusive star for his beloved as part of the grown-up fairy tale.

The quaint cobbled street will now be transformed into a fantastical world of castle turrets and market stalls.

Some of the buildings are set to be painted and the magic of cinema will ensure there is snow and a computer generated flint archway at the end of the street.

Now film crews and Hollywood actors are heading to the Ship of the Fens to shoot the sequel to the lavish costume drama, Elizabeth…

…The news comes the same month it was revealed Norwich was among the locations chosen for a film tipped to be the blockbuster of the year.

Scenes from Stardust, an epic grown-up fairy tale starring Robert De Niro, Michelle Pfeiffer and Sienna Miller, will be shot in the city’s Elm Hill.

Producers plan to change the street into a fantastical walled city, complete with an unfamiliar flint archway, differently painted houses, background fairy castle turrets, snow in the middle of summer, market stalls and a gipsy caravan.

Hollywood came to Scotland yesterday as Michelle Pfeiffer began filming for the new fantasy blockbuster Stardust.

Pfeiffer, who plays a witch in the GBP 50million movie, braved the cold on the Isle of Skye to shoot her scenes before wrapping up in a voluminous full-length padded coat between scenes.

But there was no sign of her co-stars Robert De Niro, Sienna Miller, Claire Danes or Rupert Everett, as they wisely stayed out of the cold.

The movie, based in Victorian times, is being shot on Skye as well as Wester Ross, where the large crew and their security team have already set up camp.

The film is being directed by Matthew Vaughn, whose past films include British thriller Layer Cake. He was Guy Ritchie’s best man and fell in love with Scotland at Ritchie’s wedding to Madonna in December 2000.

Vaughn said: “I am delighted to be able to work with such a stellar cast in bringing the magic of Stardust to the screen.” Locals in Wester Ross watched in amazement last week as their caravan park was transformed into the moviemakers’ own home-from-home.

Marquees sprang up overnight and a fleet of more than 20 box vans and lorries carrying millions of pounds worth of equipment caused long tailbacks.

Stardust, set in the sleepy English village of Wall, tells the story of a young man, Tristan - played by Casanova star Charlie Cox - who is on a quest to win the heart of his beloved Victoria, played by Miller.

Tristan’s adventure takes him to a fantasy world where he faces witch Lamia, played by Pfeiffer, and De Niro in the role of pirate Captain Shakespeare.