A Bewitching woman

Nicole Kidman and Will Ferrell star in Bewitched

10 April 2012

Nora Ephron spent last Saturday in a New York hotel talking up Bewitched, her big-screen reinvention of the Sixties sitcom about a suburban housewife with secret special powers and a twitchy nose.

It's a rare opportunity to meet a film-maker whose movie is already in cinemas. It isn't released in the UK until next month, but, unfortunately, the US opening of the hopeful "summer hit" has met with less than ecstatic reviews and a box office take of $50 million so far - disappointing for the star-studded Bewitched, which cost a reported $80 million to produce.

But Ephron doesn't seem worried. First, she doesn't read reviews, she says, and second, she wouldn't have done anything differently. "I would never have been interested in a straight remake of Bewitched and I love that we tried to do something that was inventive and reinventive and not the usual thing. So there it is: no regrets about that," she says.

Though Ephron, 64, grew up in Beverly Hills as one of four daughters of successful screenwriter/ producer parents, she began her working life with a glittering career as a New York journalist and essayist before succumbing to Hollywood.

Her first screenplay was a serious political drama, Silkwood, which won her an Oscar nomination in 1983. But by the late Eighties, she had become the queen of romantic comedy with her script of When Harry Met Sally. She soon began directing her own screenplays, which, in 1993, resulted in the hits Sleepless in Seattle and You've Got Mail.

When Ephron signed up for Bewitched - which she co-wrote with sister Delia Ephron and Adam McKay - all she knew was that Nicole Kidman was already cast as the lead, based on her physical similarity to the all-American blonde star of the original TV series, Elizabeth Montgomery. Ephron soon realised that she had radically to update the concept.

She came up with the idea of a vain Hollywood actor (played by Will Ferrell) starring as Darren, Samantha's husband in the original but now a character in a new TV series of Bewitched, with a newcomer and, unbeknown to her co-star, a real witch called Isabel Bigelow ( Kidman) cast in the Samantha role.

It is a TV series within a movie within a conceit and it only works sporadically but Ephron was determined to modernise the TV show, which ran between 1964 and 1972 and reflected the views of that time when it came to a woman's role.

"It was really about a woman constantly making herself less powerful; about a housewife who was always using her witchcraft to do the dishes or things around the house and that's not what women are up to now."

By the end of the film, Isabel realises that she doesn't have to give up her talent for casting spells, as she had originally thought. "She'll work it out, which is what we all do, basically," says Ephron. "All of us who have jobs and husbands and children. What we do is just muddle from day to day."

Ephron lives in New York with her third husband, crime journalist and Goodfellas screenwriter, Nicholas Pileggi. But this is the woman who wrote Heartburn, a book and later a film based on the break-up of her second marriage, to Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein. The divorce left Ephron holding their two children while her ex doggedly pursued his career.

"I think the themes of Bewitched are very interesting, I really do," she says in a nasal monotone that is as beguiling as Ephron is droll. "It asks questions of how powerful a woman can be, does a woman dare to be as powerful as she can be? How much do we have to pretend that we're not powerful in order for men to be able to connect to us? That's a theme that is still worth having some fun with."

Ephron's Bewitched also allows her to have some fun at the expense of Hollywood and all the bad behaviour it allows. Did she base the Ferrell character and his ridiculous demands on any actor in particular? "One of the things I told Will is that an actor I know - and so do you - had it in one of his contracts that every single Friday he had to be given a gift worth no less than $2,500 and it had to be a surprise," she smiles mischievously.

"As a director, what you try to do is separate that part of them from what is happening on-camera. You have to understand that these insane parts of their deals and their entourages and gyms don't matter and that what they do in the movie does."

Kidman, Ephron says, is the antithesis of the petulant star. "She basically kills herself for you. And since she'd never done anything this light, she was having fun trying this whole new part of her own talent. She swore that she couldn't improvise and that we mustn't ever make her improvise and it turned out that she was great at improvising."

Talking to Ephron, especially about such a frothy movie, it's too tempting not to go back to her journalistic past and the US political scene she covered so avidly and ask about Bernstein, who uncovered the Watergate scandal while they were together.

"I knew from way before the Nixon resignation who Deep Throat was, but Carl never told me," she says. "I guessed and I knew I was right. I told everyone that I ever met. If a stranger had come up to me on the street and asked who Deep Throat was, I would have said 'Mark Felt and here's why'. But no one paid attention to me."

Yet, it is today's White House administration that worries her more than most regimes she has lived through. "This is a shocking time politically. It's shocking to see people just sit back and let these tax cuts go through, which only benefit rich people. It's an amazing political episode; the war, the Supreme Court, the union of church and state, it's all amazing. We live in a very shocking time, yet a lot of people don't seem to be in shock."

Ephron's smart turn of phrase and self-effacing wit shine brightly in an interview setting, more brightly than is evident in Bewitched, although the film does contain many simple pleasures. You get the feeling she has a voracious appetite to live through more movies and more political maelstroms, yet she mentions her advancing years with a frequency which suggests a resignation to the brevity of life.

"I'm at that stage in life where you have to look at every single moment you're here as a present," she muses. "I wish I too could rewind the clock like Isabel can in Bewitched. I would like to rewind it about 20 years, I think, and be in my forties. Why? Because I don't want to die."

Bewitched opens on 19 August.

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