Two stars who open Virginia Film Festival present very different evenings

Date published: 11/1/2005

CHARLOTTESVILLE--Each year, the Virginia Film Festival uses serious star power to attract big audiences for its opening evening sessions.

This year's festival, which screened more than 60 films on the broad topic "In/Justice" in four days ending Sunday, followed tradition by flying in the Oscar-, Emmy- and Tony-winning Vanessa Redgrave to cover Thursday night and ushering in Charlottesville-area author John Grisham for Friday.

The two sessions were powerful and entertaining, in different ways.

Before an audience dotted with dinner jackets and glittering gowns for the opening night gala that followed, the tall and elegantly striking Redgrave screened her new film "The Fever," which ponders what roles wealth and privilege play in poverty and injustice.

The film, directed by Redgrave's son, Carlo Nero, follows her character through a fever dream of sorts.

It's an extension of the Wallace Shawn play/monologue written in the early 1990s as a look at the "social divide between the first and third worlds, and the guilt that results."

In the movie, an HBO Films presentation, Redgrave's character pulls viewers along as she considers what effect her happy, possession-filled life might have on everything from starving children to rebels (Angelina Jolie is one) forced to fight to survive.

While many in the crowd were moved by the intense, sometimes surreal film, its wealth-questioning moments and jabs at the riches of excess struck at least a few nerves.

Indeed, one of the more riveting exchanges in a Q&A with Redgrave, her son and producer Jason Blum came when an audience member asked her if she "had read a book about economics since 1945."

The actress, who serves as the special representative for the performing arts to the United Nations Children's Fund, quoted several.

She then suggested that the questioner--who tempered his inquiry by saying that he didn't want to seem "too cheeky" by asking it--might want to read some of the recent U.N. reports on poverty.

Friday night's session with Grisham had a very different feel. The best-selling author talked about the experiences of having nearly a dozen of his legal thrillers made into major motion pictures. His talk was interspersed with scenes from the films.

Those at the Grisham session seemed mainly curious for inside Hollywood facts and star stories Grisham shared.

Such as the moment in the making of "The Rain Maker," when director Francis Ford Coppola used a unique approach to get Matt Damon ready for an emotional scene.

Grisham, who spent more time on the set of that movie than most others his books have spawned, said Coppola called Damon over, backed him up against a wall, and then berated him about the way the young actor was "screwing up his movie."

Date published: 11/1/2005