Hopefully coming soon enough to a theater near you, CARLEEN McFARLANE is a period thriller about the struggle of the first convicts who sailed from Portsmouth (England) to New South Wales (Australia) in 1787. From draft to draft, the title changed, from FAUX PAS to TERRA AUSTRALIS, then LIVES LIKE KNIVES, and currently CARLEEN McFARLANE... In the process of rewriting Carleen's story, the release of Roman Polanski's THE PIANIST came as a shock to me. Not only was it a haunting biography. But the key scene in Polanski's film was exactly similar to a minor scene in this Australian epic of mine that I wrote as early as 1983, while staying at Diane Von Furstenberg's in Connecticut. So, I had written that scene no less than 14 years before the book behind Polanski's film was even published ! It feels strange, believe me, when what you created with your own imagination, and regard as a minor part of your work, eventually proves so true to life, and turns out to be actually so effective that a major director can build a major success upon it !
PS : What does Julie Christie (above) have to do with all this ? Unfortunately nothing. Except that she would have been the perfect Carleen McFarlane when she was too busy playing Lara in David Lean's "Doctor Zhivago". Anyway, timing was wrong in every way, since I was only six or eight years old, back then, and not yet in a mood for writing screenplays...
