The love affair between two literary greats will serve as the inspiration for an upcoming film by “Burn Burn Burn” director Chanya Button. According to Deadline, Button will helm a script written by actress Dame Eileen Atkins (“Doc Martin,” “Cold Mountain”) centered on the romance and friendship between Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West, a novelist, poet, and garden designer.
Little is known about the project, which will be produced by Evangelo Kioussis of Mirror Productions and Katie Holly of Blinder Films. Simon Baxter will serve as EP.
In real life, Sackville-West was the inspiration behind “Orlando,” Woolf’s influential 1928 novel about a poet who changes sex from a man to a woman. Woolf recorded the conception of the story in her diary: “And instantly the usual exciting devices enter my mind: a biography beginning in the year 1500 and continuing to the present day, called Orlando: Vita; only with a change about from one sex to the other.”
Atkins portrayed Woolf in the 1991 TV movie “A Room of One’s Own.” And she adapted Woolf’s novel “Mrs Dalloway” for a 1997 movie of the same name starring Vanessa Redgrave (“Call the Midwife,” “Nip/Tuck”).
British director Button received the BFI LOCO Film Festival’s Discover Award for an outstanding debut feature this April. “Burn Burn Burn” made its world premiere at the London Film Festival in 2015. Deadline notes that Button has another project in the works: she is “attached to direct ‘Shore,’ a postapocalyptic sci-fi pic written by Melissa Iqbal and produced by Kitty Kaletsky of Midnight Road Entertainment.”
When we asked Button what advice she has for women directors, she said, “Don’t be afraid to talk about being a female director! Of course I’d so much rather we were just ‘directors’ and not singled out for our gender. But whilst we’re still working in an industry where there’s such a profound lack of diversity in the director’s chair, I think it’s important we’re all cool with talking about it until things change.” She added, “More diversity of filmmakers means more diversity in the stories we get to see on screen — and that can only be a great thing.”
