Hanif Kureishi’s VENUS Inspiration
January 27th, 2007 by Andre Soares
"On most Fridays for years I have had breakfast with a group of friends in Notting Hill. Occasionally we would persuade a couple of younger women to join us. Mostly, though, it was only older men — actors, writers, theatre and film directors — people I’d known since I first began to work in London, in the mid-1970s. One morning we were talking about sleep and how to induce it, a popular and important subject among the over-40s. We discussed sleeping pills and sleeping draughts, and then about how to overcome the inevitable addiction. One of my friends and I would then shuffle off to the chemist, where he would get his pills. This friend said he found our Friday mornings to be particularly relaxing, compared to the difficulty of the rest of his life. He suggested he’d be happy sitting in a coffee shop, like old men he’d seen in Cairo, discussing world affairs while drinking tea and smoking a hookah."
That’s screenwriter Hanif Kureishi, 52, in "The debt to pleasure." In the article, Kureishi explains that he was inspired to write Venus after reading Junichiro Tanizaki’s 1961 novella Diary of a Mad Old Man, in which a dying old man becomes infatuated with his son’s cruel wife.
I’m not a Venus fan — much to the contrary — though the film has generally been well received in both the US and the UK, especially because of Peter O’Toole’s performance, which I find one of the worst of his long career.
Academy Awards 2007 - Nominated Producers
Berlin Film Festival 2007 Film Line-Up
Swiss Film Awards - 2006 Winners
Golden Beetle Swedish Film Awards - 2006 Winners
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