Portman makes directorial debut
Natalie Portman’s directorial debut, Eve, has been presented at the Venice Film Festival.
The 21-minute movie, screened out of competition in the short film section, revolves around a young woman called Kate, who visits her grandmother Lola for dinner and is surprised to find her on a date with a man named Joe.
Harvard University graduate Portman, who was on the jury at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, said she has always had a fascination with the older generations and this can be seen in the film. The cast includes veteran actress Lauren Bacall.
Portman, who was nominated for an Oscar for her role in Closer, said: “The film was definitely inspired by personal experience and also all my friends, female friends, starting to define themselves in relation, and in reaction to, their mothers and their grandmothers.”
The 27-year-old continued: “I have been working now in films for 16 years…it was exciting to know what a director goes through and also to create something completely on your own.
“When you are an actor of course you are creating something but you are serving someone else’s vision and ultimately it’s someone else’s creation. To have authorship is … and feels like a more adult job.”
Portman - who shot to fame as a teenager befriending a professional killer in Luc Besson’s 1990s hit Leon and has since starred in the second Star Wars trilogy - said getting Bacall on board was like fulfilling her “wildest dream”.
“It’s so exciting to see someone with that much experience and that much wisdom on screen. It’s rare,” she said.
The clamour to see the film when it was screened was so great that hundreds of people queued round the block with only 500 people allowed in the Lido’s Sala Perla cinema.
Meanwhile, Portman has received a humanity award for social commitment and charity work.
The prize was awarded for her work with the Tacare Girl’s Scholarship Programme of the Jane Goodall Institute, a non-profit organisation that carries out wildlife research in Tanzania.
Portman’s prize is $50,000 (25,000) and a trophy - the cash she receives is being donated to the programme, according to organisers.
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