Martin Amis’ novel London Fields has, like so much of his work, proved a real challenge to get on the screen. Fields has been in the works since at least the year 2000, when the rights were first purchased. Now in a surprise twist, it’s being shot with Billy Bob Thornton, Amber Heard, Jim Sturgess and Theo James in the lead roles.
Ads man Matthew Cullen is the director who has finally wrangled it into production, working from an adaptation by Amis himself and Roberta Hanley. Heard plays femme fatale Nicola, possessed of unusual beauty and hypnotic magnetism. Mysterious and clairvoyant, she sets a plan in motion to fulfil the prophecy of her own murder.
Caught up in Nicola’s plan are a terminally ill writer (Thornton), a lowly street hustler (Sturgess) and an unhappily married banker (James), who become intertwined in a love triangle that unfolds in the grimy underbelly of a dystopian London (written in 1989, the book was set in a dark 1999). Samson convinces Nicola to let him document her manipulations in a book she says will be his literary masterpiece, but only she knows who the tale will end and who her killer will be…
Cullen, who has worked extensively on commercials and directed the prologue for Pacific Rim, is cranking the cameras now in London and plans to have the film ready for release next year. Can he succeed where the likes of David Cronenberg, Michael Winterbottom and Shekhar Kapur have tried and failed? Watch this space…