A Quiet Passion, a biopic of the reclusive American poet Emily Dickinson, is finally going into production after it was first announced back in 2012. Dickinson will be played by Cynthia Nixon, with Jennifer Ehle now also announced in the cast. Shooting begins in Belgium this week, with Terence Davies directing. Davies, the British director whose lyrical films include Of Time and the City and Distant Voices, Still Lives, announced the project at the Toronto film festival in 2012, saying he had written it with Nixon in mind, but without knowing if she would sign on for it.
“It was the kind of dream casting you hope for. I never, for a moment, imagined my wishes would materialise. Cynthia has such a strong feeling for the work — and now she is our Emily Dickinson. I’m over the moon,” he said.
Nixon, best known for playing Miranda in Sex and the City, said: “When I read what Terence had written, I was consumed by the character he had so beautifully put on the page. Emily Dickinson’s words and Terence’s somehow dovetail to create a heady elixir. When I put the script down, I knew it was a story that I simply have to be part of.”
Dickinson’s poetry is now widely admired for its lucidity, mysticism and torrid energy, but was little read in her lifetime. Only a dozen of around 1,800 poems were published while she was alive, and even her family were unaware of the extent of her work. Born in Amhurst, Massachusetts in 1830, she lived in the town for much of her life — often quite reclusively, but had passionate correspondence with a number of close acquaintances. Davies recently completed another film in Sunset Song, an adaptation of Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s novel about a Scottish farmer battling with her dysfunctional family as well as the tragedies of the First World War. It stars Agyness Deyn alongside Peter Mullan, and was filmed in Scotland and New Zealand last year.
