MUMBAI, March 12, (Agencies): US director Steven Spielberg is planning to produce a film set partly on the de facto border between India and Pakistan in the disputed Kashmir region, a report said Tuesday.
Spielberg, who is currently in India’s entertainment capital Mumbai, told The Times of India that the film would be produced by his DreamWorks Studios and its Indian partner Reliance Entertainment, which is headed by tycoon Anil Ambani.
“We have finalised a script for a movie,” Spielberg said.
“Part of it will take place on the India-Pakistan border in Kashmir. But we’re still trying to figure out the casting, locations and who’s going to direct it.”
On Monday night, Spielberg spoke to a gathering of Indian directors at an event moderated by Bollywood superstar Amitabh Bachchan in Mumbai.

Simple
Bachchan later said on Twitter that he had “a scintillating evening with Mr Steven Spielberg”, describing the acclaimed director’s comments as “simple, honest and with immense candor”.
The 66-year-old is reportedly on his first visit to Mumbai partly to celebrate the success of his film “Lincoln”, which was co-produced by Reliance Entertainment.
Spielberg, known for classic hits such as “Jaws”, “E.T.” and “Jurassic Park”, was seen by AFP leaving Ambani’s office on Monday afternoon. Reports said billionaire Ambani and his wife Tina were throwing a lavish party in honour of the director during his visit.
 

“The Great Gatsby,” with Leonardo di Caprio starring in a remake of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel, will open the 66th Cannes Film Festival, the organisers announced on Tuesday.
The film, screened out of competition, will be shown on May 15, coinciding with its launch across France.
Cannes, widely rated as the world’s top film festival, climaxes on May 26 with awards selected by a jury headed this year by Hollywood legend Steven Spielberg.
Set on the US East Coast of the Roaring Twenties, “Gatsby” stars di Caprio as Fitzgerald’s mysterious millionaire, battling to win the heart of a girl he courted in his youth.
The film was scripted by Australian director Baz Luhrman and his long-time co-screenwriter Craig Pearce. It will be shown in 3D, for the second time in the festival’s history, after the animated picture “Up” in 2009.
Luhrmann, 50, is a familiar figure at Cannes, where he has been twice honoured, for “Strictly Ballroom” in 1992 and “Moulin Rouge!” in 2001.
He said he was thrilled to return to the Riviera city.
“F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote some of the most poignant and beautiful passages of his extraordinary novel just a short distance away, at a villa outside St. Raphael,” he said in a statement.
 

The One World international human rights documentary film festival which opens in Bucharest on Tuesday will give special focus to the Holocaust to highlight the devastating consequences of hatred and intolerance.
“The 6th edition of the (One World Romania) festival aims to be an antidote to hatred”, organisers said.
“The amount of hatred and intolerance per square meter has grown exponentially since the previous edition of One World Romania”, festival director Alexandru Solomon said.
“That’s why we decided to give special focus to the Holocaust which was the most vicious manifestation of hatred in recent history”, he added.
Romanian filmmaker Florin Iepan will present as a world premiere his documentary “Odessa” which focuses on one of the largest mass executions of Jews in the Second World War.
About 22,000 Jews were killed in Odessa in 1941 by Romanian-led forces.
“To what extent are my compatriots willing to reflect on this particular episode?”, Iepan wonders as the Holocaust often remained taboo under the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe.

Admitted
Bulgaria’s parliament admitted only last week for the first time having failed to save over 11,000 Jews from territories under its control in Serbia, Greece and Macedonia.
But the festival’s main section “Hatred is bad for your health” will also highlight the discrimination faced by Roma and Vietnamese minorities in a Czech village (On Decency, by Radovan Sibrt) or by homosexuals in Uganda (Call me Kuchu, By Katherine Fairfax Wright and Malika Zouhali-Worral).
“We also carefully chose six powerful films about people with so-called disabilities in order to raise acceptance in society”, Solomon said.
A total of 60 documentaries from around the globe will be shown until Sunday in Bucharest in one of the biggest documentary film festivals in eastern Europe.
One World Romania was created under the patronage of late Czech president Vaclav Havel, the icon of the anticommunist movement in many Eastern European countries. A similar festival called One World International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival is based in Prague and has its annual event from March 4-13.
 

The $80 million debut weekend of “Oz the Great and Powerful” gave Hollywood its first blockbuster of 2013 and should provide the box-office a much-needed shot in the arm, but Disney didn’t rush to green light a sequel Monday.
It seems unusual to be anything but ecstatic after an $80 million opening but that’s the sort of scrutiny a $200 million movie with a marketing budget at least half that size draws. And the box office is never the end game for Disney with projects of this scope and cost.
The successful US debut assures that the gears behind the massive Mouse marketing machine — the one that turns movie sequels, theme park rides, licensing and merchandising (think China Dolls) into millions and sometimes billions of dollars — will keep turning and that it will head down the yellow brick road, at least for now.
But just how much marketing and creative muscle Disney will put behind the works of L. Frank Baum in the future will be determined in the next few weeks, when we see just how big a blockbuster “Oz” is going to be. Mitchell Kapner, who co-wrote the film, is currently writing a sequel, but that’s still a long way from a green light.
The domestic debut was in line with expectations, and likely translates to a total of around $250 million. The foreign number — a $70 million first weekend from roughly 80 percent of the film’s international markets — wasn’t particularly strong, however.
 

“Alice in Wonderland” did $94 million in its first week abroad. The total for “Oz” is nearly the same as the first-week overseas gross turned in by “John Carter,” last year’s sci-fi megaflop that opened to $30 million here and forced a $200 million Disney write down. (For the record, “John Carter” finished with $209 million overseas, and $73 million domestically.)
“I wouldn’t rule out a sequel and it could be a good idea,” Matt Harrigan, an analyst at Wunderlich Securities told TheWrap on Monday, “but it would have to be leaner, and cost maybe $130 million or $150 million, so there wouldn’t be so much pressure on the profitability.”
“If it doesn’t happen, it will be a shame, because there is so much material there that could be exploited, not just in terms of movies, but park rides and merchandising and such,” Harrigan said.
Media and cultural heat will matter as moviegoers make choices and Disney decides whether to return to the land of Oz in the years to come.

“It’s social currency as much as dollars,” Disney’s distribution chief Dave Hollis told TheWrap. “People start talking about it, others want to be able to and suddenly people who’ve gotten out of the habit of going to the movies just might.”
Last year’s March hit “The Hunger Games” generated that kind of heat after opening to $152 million.
But “Oz” didn’t come near that, or for that matter, the $116 million that “Alice in Wonderland” opened to in March 2010. Disney executives knew before the opening that “Oz,” directed by Sam Raimi and starring James Franco, wouldn’t match those numbers. “Alice” featured Tim Burton and Johnny Depp at their peak popularity, and was groundbreaking in terms of its use of 3D. Production designer Robert Stromberg worked on both films.