A movie about the famous murder case surrounding Amanda Knox, "The Face of an Angel," premieres Saturday at the Toronto International Film Festival, starring British actress Kate Beckinsale as real-life journalist Barbie Latza Nadeau, who wrote the book on which the movie is based.
In an article for The Daily Beast, Nadeau recalls her 2010 meeting with filmmaker Michael Winterbottom, who would write the movie script to include the both of them as characters.
"I remember worrying that a movie about this murder would be ultimately sensational, bloody, and disrespectful to Meredith Kercher, who didn’t deserve to be a victim once more," Nadeau, author of "Angel Face" wrote ahead of the movie's debut.
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"What I hadn’t considered during the initial phases was that while they created their characters for the film based on people I introduced them to, I would inevitably become inspiration for a character myself. When I read the script a few months later, I was nothing short of shocked to find a character who was like me . . ."
Nadeau makes a small cameo in the film, and, after seeing a sneak peek of the film, said that Winterbottom's treatment of Knox and the case was thought-provoking, as it mixes fact and fiction.
"At a private screening with friends in Rome on Tuesday night, many of whom were fellow journalists, I felt the urge to hand hold them through each scene, explaining what was real and what was fiction," she said. "The whole film sits somewhere in the middle, which somehow separates it from the real murder case without straying too far from the truth about what really happened in Perugia during the murder trials."
In the end, she seems contented, concluding that, "There is scant attention paid to Knox’s as a polarizing figure, and plenty paid to Kercher as someone whose life ended so needlessly; the film is in fact dedicated to her memory."
The Guardian (UK) reported Tuesday in its pre-show roundup for the film festival that Winterbottom is no stranger to creating portraits of polarizing figures. The portrayal of Knox in "The Face of an Angel" follows Winterbottom's treatment of the Tipton Three in "The Road to Guantánamo," Daniel Pearl's wife in "A Mighty Heart," and porn mogul Paul Raymond in "The Look of Love."
"What's different in the age of Facebook and Instagram is that people are very aware of the mechanism of constructing a story, a version of their own lives or experience, which is a version of the truth, but very different to the experience itself," he said ahead of the premiere.
"I like the film to cross backwards and forwards over the borders between fiction and fact, or between the observed and the constructed, or the random and the controlled."
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