Actress Julie Christie smiles beside Bill Nighy during the news conference for the film "Glorious 39" at the 34th Toronto International Film Festival in Toronto on Sept. 16, 2009.MIKE CASSESE
At today's press conference for Glorious 39, a historic thriller set in the tense weeks leading up to the start of the Second World War, the most famous of the five persons on the dais at the Sutton Place Hotel was told by a Mexican journalist, "You are a legend," then, in the next breath, asked, "What does it mean to you?"
The legendary Julie Christie replied with a laugh: "It means I'm very, very old."
Well, we wouldn't say "very, very." "Old" perhaps. She is 68, after all -- but she continues to be a riveting presence on-screen and off. Perhaps the secret to her undiminished luminosity comes from the fact that she's been a sporadic screen presence the last 10 years, avoiding all the wear and tear that that entails (including things like TIFF).
"I never want to work," she admitted at the presser. But last year she found herself surrendering to director-screenwriter Stephen Poliakoff's "very persuasive manner" when he came bearing the script of Glorious 39. Christie plays Aunt Elizabeth, the wily grande dame of a prominent family of English aristocrats determined to maintain the privileges enjoyed for generations, even if it means inking a peace pact with the Nazis to turn Britain into a Vichy-like state.
Glorious 39 is at TIFF, in part, to whet the appetites of U.S. buyers who, if the examples of Atonement, The Remains of the Day, The English Patient, Finding Neverland and The Hours are any indication, continue to have a fondness for handsomely mounted historic Britpics and their Oscar prospects. Asked his view of the recent decision by the Academy Awards to expand the best-picture category to 10 films from five, Poliakoff said it might prove a "great [thing]if it allowed unexpected films" to make the short-list. However, echoing the view of other observers, he worried the expanded short-list may end up being a gambit to position "franchise films" (i.e., Hollywood blockbusters like 2008's Iron Man and The Dark Knight) on the short-list, perhaps at the expense of more indie-orientated or thematically ambitious fare.
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