Turtletaub's 'Borges and Me' Screens at Edinburgh
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- "Borges and Me" screens Out of Competition at the Edinburgh International Film Festival, marking director Marc Turtletaub's return to feature filmmaking with a road movie adapted from Jay Parini's memoir about a graduate student driving across the Scottish Highlands with poet Jorge Luis Borges
- The film was shot across 61 locations in Scotland as a four-country co-production between Holland, Belgium, the UK, and the U.S. — a scale Turtletaub admits is rare in modern UK filmmaking
- Luis Gnecco, who previously starred in Pablo Neruda biopic "Neruda," plays Borges opposite Fionn Whitehead, with Alan Cumming, Peter Mullan, Freya Mavor, John Gordon Sinclair, Morven Christie, and Stuart Bowman rounding out a heavily Scottish supporting cast
- Gnecco's preparation included reading nearly everything written about Borges, tracking down a Borges-authored film Turtletaub didn't know existed, and teaching himself Anglo-Saxon to deliver a single scripted line — a level of work Turtletaub called the best he's ever seen from an actor
- Author Jay Parini was on set daily and wrote song lyrics on the spot for a scene in which Freya Mavor performs a number, while screenwriter Oren Moverman earned Parini's verdict that the script was "a masterclass in adaptation"
- Turtletaub's next project is a Moverman-scripted adaptation of Ben Reeves' debut novel "Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt," which debuted on the New York Times bestseller list in its first week of release
Why it matters: A 61-location Scottish road movie financed as a four-country co-production is unusually ambitious for an indie, and Turtletaub already has his next literary adaptation queued with the same screenwriter — a book-to-screen pipeline his company is clearly committed to scaling.
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