Twist and Shout

Having grabbed a fistful of Oscars and a small mountain of critical acclaim last year for gloomy World War II drama The Pianist, Roman Polanski is now turning his head to something a little lighter. He will make a new version of Charles Dicken's Oliver Twist - and he has just cast fellow Oscar regular Sir Ben Kingsley as Fagin. Despite the involvement of many of his Pianist cast and crew, Polanski insists that this will be a happier film. "I want to make a film for children, in particular my own children, who deserve it. It is going to be colorful and not dark as The Pianist was," he said. It perhaps says something about Polanski that his idea of "colourful" is a film about a poverty-stricken orphan living on the streets of Victorian London and falling in with a bad crowd. Ten-year-old British actor Barney Clark will be playing Oliver, with Jamie Foreman as Bill Sykes and Frank Finlay as Mr. Brownlow. Filming is due to last four months, starting in Prague in July. Polanski promises an accurate recreation of Victorian London, complete with traffic jams. ""If you think that traffic jams are something of the present, you are wrong -- they had the most monumental traffic jams then. We want to reconstruct that and give a feeling of it." Of course, he could just film a day on the North Circular much more cheaply, but that might prove less than scintillating entertainment.