My screenplay for ‘Thirteen Lives’, the story of the Thai boys’ football team that became trapped in a cave, starts shooting on Monday March 29, in sets built near Brisbane, Australia. Ron Howard directs a cast that includes Viggo Mortensen, Colin Farrell and Joel Edgerton, as well as some of Thailand’s leading actors. I’ve stayed here in lockdown in Sussex, trading Zoom calls with Ron as the screenplay has evolved. It feels strange to see pictures of the sets, and to think that all that way away the story in which I’ve been so involved is being brought to life. I’ve been on so many film sets, and it’s still a magical experience after all these years; but this time I must imagine it from afar.

‘Hope Gap’ is now available on Netflix.

‘Thirteen Lives’, my screenplay of the ordeal of the Thai boys’ football team trapped in a cave, is now in production in Australia, with Ron Howard directing. Cast so far includes Viggo Mortensen, Colin Farrell and Joel Edgerton.

I’m at work on a screenplay, ‘The Big Three’, about the relationship between Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin in the war, with director Tom Harper.

We’re still effectively locked down in Sussex, but all well.

Last night I was reunited with Annette Bening, Bill Nighy and Josh O’Connor for a virtual Q&A streamed into all the cinemas showing ‘Hope Gap’. It was very nostalgic for me, and reminded me how much I’d loved making this film. They’ve all been troopers over publicising the film, and we seem to have hit a moment when there’s not much else out there, apart of course for the titan that is ‘Tenet’. this means we’ve had far more coverage than I’d expected. The feedback has been wonderful. There can’t be big box office in a time of coronavirus, but at least the film has had its moment in the sun, and I’m more than happy.

‘Hope Gap’ is released tomorrow by the Curzon chain, and will be in 39 cinemas. In these strange times the cinemas will be operating with social distancing, and I guess many people will be afraid to go out, but at least my film is becoming available. An early review in the Financial Times tickles me:

‘Tea and toast co-star. You guess right. Something dreadful is in wait… That sound of things at boiling point is not the kettle… Your sympathies are deftly toyed with; Nighy jitters and surprises; O’Connor has the sad gravity of the eternal referee. Bening, meanwhile, is compelling…’

More reviews to come, and many will be less kind; but I’m braced for that now. It’s hard when you make a work that’s so personal to find some people actively disliking it, but on the other hand, no one asked me to make it, and I have only myself to blame for putting it out there. The truth is nothing and no one is liked by everyone, but we’re usually protected from knowing this. Imagine if every now and again our friends posted reviews of us…

The Barcelona Film Festival had to operate online only, but even so it was a fine roster of new films - and ‘Hope Gap’ has come out as Best Film, to my huge delight. We still don’t have a release date for the film in the UK, or in most other territories, though since it has been released in the US it is available to stream there.

As lockdown comes to an end here, I’m busy with my screenplay for ‘Thirteen Lives’ (the story of the Thai football team trapped in a flooded cave), which is to be directed by Ron Howard for MGM; and with my screenplay for ‘The Big Three’ (Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin in the war), which is being developed by Skydance to be directed by Tom Harper.

‘Hope Gap’ is now available in the US and is picking up a mixed bag of reviews. I don’t read them, mostly, because even quite friendly reviews can hurt a lot. I know this is weak of me, but it’s for my own self-preservation. However, some are good, like this from Peter Travers in Rolling Stone:

‘Hope Gap’ Review: Marriage as Combat, Life as Surrender

Annette Bening rages as a scorned wife in this melodramatic, yet at times tender, portrait of the dissolution of a 29-year union

Annette Bening lets it rip as Grace, a bile-spewing wife who keeps coming so hard at her reserved husband Edward (Bill Nighy) that she’s practically daring him to leave her. When, after 29 years, he finally gets up the nerve to do just that, all hell breaks loose. Edward and Grace are academics — he teaches history; she’s assembling an anthology of great poems that deal with the traumas of life. Hope Gap is Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? set in the British countryside, with marriage a duel to the death. Screenwriter-director William Nicholson was Oscar nominated for the script he co-wrote for Gladiator, but the bloodletting here beats anything in the Roman arena. It’s emotional rather than literal, of course. And the pair’s grown son, Jamie (a very fine Josh O’Connor), is caught in the middle of the hostilities. A leap off the jagged white cliffs that loom outside this couple’s seaside Tudor home couldn’t do more damage than Grace and Edward inflict on each other.

Hope Gap is a deeply personal project for Nicholson, who is performing an autopsy on the marriage of his own parents, with him as the son trying to be faithful and fair to both combatants. First presented on stage in 1999 as The Retreat from Moscow, using a Napoleonic disaster as a metaphor for his parents’ split, Hope Gap comes to the screen with its theatrical origins seeping through every scene. The staginess of characters reciting monologues at each other can make for a static and off-putting experience.

But Nicholson has anatomized a relationship before, in his superb 1993 film adaptation of his play Shadowlands, about the real-life love connection between Oxford don, born-again Christian, and Narnia chronicler C.S. Lewis (Anthony Hopkins) and the married poet Joy Gresham (Debra Winger). And once again he is blessed with his actors. What Hopkins and Winger did to blow away stage-bound mustiness, Bening and Nighy accomplish in Hope Gap with equally brilliant assurance. Nighy, playing a man stooped in submission, finds the fire to suggest that Edward won’t mind looking ridiculous for a shot at happiness with another woman. “The way I am seems to suit her,” he tells his son with rending simplicity. There is nothing simple about Grace, whose verbal assaults are wounding to husband and son. “You’re no good at making people love you,” she cruelly tells Jamie, before lashing out at Edward for his “sneaking, two-faced, marital treachery.” As Grace sees it, her Catholic God has deserted her. She swings from thoughts of suicide to working a grief hotline for people more depressed than she is. In an example of the film’s acid humor, Grace adopts a dog she names Edward and brings to heel with commands of “stay.”

It’s a bear of a role, soaked in rage and self-pity. Yet Bening, a magnificent actress in peak form, never runs from the challenge of finding the wounded heart of a woman who can’t or won’t let go. As a film, Hope Gap is indelible and infuriating in equal measure, often at odds with itself and the demands of an audience. But in coming to terms with his parents and the role they play in shaping in life, even after death, Nicholson speaks to something universal: the comedy and tragedy of the human condition.

With the coming of coronavirus my family and some added friends are hunkering down here at Court House in Sussex. My son Teddy, my daughters Julia and Maria, Julia’s boyfriend Tom Wills, and four other friends have formed what Teddy has named the Court House plague colony. All are working from home, and spend their time in conference calls, which so stretches our wifi that I’ve added a mobile wifi hotspot with unlimited data. Like everyone else, we have no idea how long this strange situation will last, but we have determined to make it as positive an experience as possible.

In the outer world, where everything is grinding to a halt, my film has of course vanished, and it looks as if its UK release won’t happen. I can’t repine about this, when such disaster is overtaking so many, and I don’t. We’re all living day to day.

My film has its first proper opening this week in 18 cinemas, widening if all goes well to a maximum of 160. Annette Bening is doing a lot of publicity, including the Ellen DeGeneris and James Corden TV shows. And we have our first really favourable review, from Deadline Hollywood’s Pete Hammond:

‘It says a lot to proclaim Annette Bening’s portrayal of a woman in denial about her failing marriage in Hope Gap as one of the very best of her career. Yet it most definitely is. Sporting a nifty English accent, the four-time Oscar nominee hits new notes of authenticity and power as Grace, a wife of 29 years who is surprised and devastated when her husband suddenly says he wants out. That is the premise of this raw and revealing look at the effect of a breakup on not only the two at the center of it, but the entire family unit. It is something writer-director William Nicholson knows well as this very personal film was inspired by his own reaction to the end of his parents’ 30-year marriage. This isn’t directly their story, but one that may strike universal chords among families who have been through this kind of traumatic experience… I cannot say enough for what this superb trio of actors brings to these roles. It all feels so intimate that it could be a play, but Nicholson in choosing the town of Seaford makes the setting singularly cinematic. Bening gets right to the core of Grace, a woman with spirit who refuses to accept what her husband is doing and almost desperately tries to turn it around, even with the sad fact her marriage may not have ever been what she believed it was. Nighy’s completely believable here, as is O’Connor (currently Prince Charles in The Crown, and again opposite Nighy in Emma), ideally cast as a young man who never dreamed this could happen to his family, and who has to become a go-between as a new reality sets in. There are especially poignant moments here as well, and some very funny ones especially when Grace decides to get a dog as a new companion and names him Edward. The line she throws at the dog in the lawyer’s office, “Edward, stay,” not only draws a laugh but also says more than you can imagine about her state of mind. Hope Gap is a compelling and rich human drama with acting that is just about as good as it gets.’

Release dates can change, but at present the plan is for HOPE GAP to be released in the US on March 6 2020, and in the UK on June 12 2020. The UK release, by Curzon, will be in their cinemas and other independents, but also in some multiplexes. Ahead of the UK release Curzon will be screening the film in selected locations round the country, and I’ll be present to meet the audience and answer questions afterwards. It’s such a personal film, and one that I’ve already found resonates so powerfully with many people, that I want to get as many opportunities as possible to share and compare experiences face to face.

Tomorrow is the first of four screenings of ‘Hope Gap’ at the London Film Festival, starting with a Gala Screening at the Odeon Leicester Square. Tricia Tuttle, Director of the LFF, has embraced the film warmly. From her letter to me:

‘Our programmers were thoroughly charmed by this sharply scripted, gorgeously designed drama, that will have audiences leaving the cinema and rushing straight to the coast – the British seaside has rarely looked so lush. Annette Bening is extraordinary in a role that is perfectly calibrated to stay enthralling even as Grace works through the most unreasonable of emotions, while Bill Nighy is on equally top form as the man who has made up his mind. We know that audiences will be as charmed as we are with Hope Gap, and we are delighted to be able to present the film to them.’

The actual release is still many months away, but for me tomorrow is a big day.

Meanwhile I’m hard at work on what I hope will be my next film…

‘Hope Gap’ will have its first public screening at the Toronto Film Festival, on September 6 2019, and its second at the London Film Festival on October 4. This means it will get its first reviews, a couple at least, even though it won’t be released until next year. Right now I’m living under the happy illusion that the film is something very special, because only people who are kind to me have seen it so far. After Toronto and London, that will change. I’ve endured some brutal shocks following screenings at Toronto: ‘Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom’ had a triumphant screening and a poor critical response; as did ‘Breathe’. I was in Toronto for ‘Mandela’, but not for ‘Breathe’, where the shock was all the greater because the screening, they told me, was so applauded. It’s a powerful film, beautifully directed by Andy Serkis, and will live on, but these festival roller-coaster rides are tough on the system. All this by way of indicating that I’m braced for whatever comes.

Glancing down the list of films also showing in Toronto and London makes me giddy: the kind of giddiness that takes the form of realising, when you look up at the stars on a clear night, how insignificant you are. So many famous directors, so many famous stars.

The solution: to set my thoughts firmly on the new project which I am even now devising, and to tell myself that whatever happens, the future holds wonder and glory. So I leap from one illusion to another, forever excited by tomorrow, like a small child. I suppose on my death bed I’ll be caught murmuring, ‘The best is yet to come…’

Last night we screened HOPE GAP for cast and crew and a large gathering of my family and friends, about a hundred in all. It’s always hard to judge when an audience is so pre-selected to approve, but for me at least the screening was hugely encouraging. The film felt powerful, and visibly affected many. I’m beginning to get used to each viewer responding personally, as if the story is about them. My pride in the film remains intact, for now at least.

The UK and US distributors, Curzon and Roadside Attraction, seem to be settling on next spring for the release. This is a long way off, and hard for me, but they’re the experts on when we’ll have the best chance of getting noticed. Meanwhile we now begin submitting the film to the many festivals.

And I’m on the hunt for the right subject for the next film that I’ll write and direct…

The final sound mix has just been finished, the picture is graded, and the film is done. I’ve now seen it in its various forms so many times I no longer have much reaction to it, but dimly through the layers of familiarity I’m aware that it has emerged as everything I had ever hoped for it. The whole film-making experience has been unexpectedly free from grief. I keep pinching myself, expecting something to go wrong, but so far so good. Almost the last element to be added, the music (by Alex Heffes), is deeply gratifying. The end of the film in particular is made doubly powerful by the score.

We’ve already sold HOPE GAP on the basis of script, cast, and a five-minute promo, to all territories worldwide except US and UK. These we’re holding back to sell following a screening of the finished film, which will happen in the new year. Once we have the distributors in place for these lead territories we’ll know the release plan.

The film is now shot, and we're in the editing process. Five weeks of intense work, in Seaford for the exteriors, in Leeds for various interiors, and in an industrial estate near Doncaster for the studio work. All strangely surreal. But we completed the schedule on time, thanks to the commitment of the crew and the skills of our cinematographer Anna Valdez Hanks, and the result - what can I say? I'm excited by what we've got, but daren't admit it. Some kind of superstitious dread stops me from admitting even to myself how high my hopes now reach. Enough to say the three lead actors, Annette Bening, Bill Nighy and Josh O'Connor have exceeded my wildest expectations. Whatever the limits of my work as director, their performances are superb.

We're now in pre-production on HOPE GAP, which is fully financed and green-lit. This week a series of location visits with the team, and intense discussions with the Heads of Department. We start rehearsals with Annette Bening, Bill Nighy and Josh O'Connor on June 27. We shoot from July 10.

I've been refining the script as I go over it with Anna Valdez Hanks, our Director of Photography, and Simon Rogers, our Production Designer. We have a tight shoot - just under six weeks - and need to be super-prepared. But it feels good. I've been planning this for so long now that I'm eager to get under way. I feel as if we've already shot it, it's so clear, frame by frame, in my head.

In the end my film will succeed or fail on the performances of the three lead actors. My job, it seems to me, is to create a secure and trusting space within which they can explore and be adventurous and discover the truth of their characters. I still find great acting magical: I don't really know how they do it. I just know I want it.

This summer - if nothing goes wrong - I'll be filming HOPE GAP, directing from my own screenplay. It's based on my play THE RETREAT FROM MOSCOW, which ran on Broadway some years ago with Eileen Atkins, John Lithgow and Ben Chaplin, and was Tony-nominated. I've developed the script extensively for the film version, which will be played by Annette Bening, Bill Nighy and Josh O'Connor. The story is small-scale - pretty much just the mother, the father, and the grown-up son - but it should be extremely emotionally powerful. I like to think of it as a mid-point between 'Brief Encounter' and 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf' - not as sentimental as the former, nor as bitter as the latter. But I should be so lucky as to come close to either.

I'm still pinching myself that I've been able to get my dream cast. With such actors I feel I can't go wrong. I haven't directed since 'Firelight', nearly twenty years ago, a film I've always been proud of, but my experience of the distribution process (managed by Harvey Weinstein) was so bad that it's taken me till now to return to directing. I loved shooting it and editing it. I hated all that followed.

This time will be different. I have my old friend David Thompson as producer, and together we're putting together a fine team. We shoot from late June to mid-August. The finished result will be out some time next year.

Today is my seventieth birthday: as always, too near Christmas to make me want to celebrate in any elaborate way, but a small gathering of friends and family will be joining me over the weekend. It's commonplace for people to say they don't feel their age, and that's true of me too: I am as full of ideas, and of early morning eagerness to be at my desk, as ever, and I'm working as hard as ever, if you can call what I do work. But in another sense I am fully aware that a milestone has been reached. Seventy can't be called middle age. Seventy is old. Seventy is the beginning of the last phase of life. The effect this knowledge has on me is powerful, and in its way exciting: I feel that time is limited, and I must use it well. My ambition, always a great driver, has changed, though not lessened. I feel there is still time - just - to do my best work ever, and nothing else will do. In personal terms I find myself wanting to treasure every day that I have with those I love. In spiritual terms - and after all, for the first twenty years of my life I was a convinced believer in an afterlife - my goal is to make myself ready for death. That may seem premature, but I think it's going to take time. The instinct is to cling on at all costs. I want, when my time comes, to look back on my entire life with gratitude, not disappointment; and to release myself without regret.

I first began work on this film ten years ago, which is an indication of how long films can take to reach audiences; if they ever do at all. Jonathan Cavendish, its producer, told me the story of his parents, and I knew at once I wanted to write it as a screenplay, even though at that point there was no finance available. I was happy to embark on the project with Jonathan, and let it lead wherever it might. The result is now completed, and has proved to be one of the best experiences of my life as a screenwriter. Not since 'Shadowlands' has a work of mine been translated to the screen intact. I'm lucky to have fallen into the hands of a director as wise, as skilled, and as remarkable with actors, as Andy Serkis; and I'm lucky to have been graced with two lead actors of the talent of Andrew Garfield and Claire Foy.

So I love the film, and find it moving every time I watch it. But of course I'm aware that there are many who don't much like it.

I want to pay tribute to one of the happiest experiences in my life. It took place in Cape Town, in July and August of this year.

A black township musical called 'King Kong' has just opened in Cape Town, a revival of an iconic show that was last performed in 1959. Back then it caused a sensation, and still lingers in the memories of South Africans. It was called 'King Kong' not after the great ape, but after a real boxer who had this as his nickname. The music - township jazz of the era - was written by Todd Matshikiza, and the show starred the then-young Miriam Makeba. It travelled to London, was acclaimed, then died. All these years later producer Eric Abraham has revived it. The original featured a number of glorious songs that are still well known in South Africa, and several spectacular dance numbers, but was weak on story telling and character. Eric called on me to work on the book and lyrics to embed the famous songs in a more coherent show.

In doing this I realised several of the characters needed songs of their own, so I ended up writing six new songs, as well as the revised and developed book. These songs have been set to music by the show's musical director, Charl Johann-Lingenfelder, who has brilliantly channeled the style of Todd Matshikiza. Eric then hired director Jonathan Munby and choreographer Greg Maqoma. We four, working in the Fugard Theatre in Cape Town, then built the new show.

A film I've been working on for a long time is finally completed, and will be in cinemas from late October. It's called 'Breathe', and stars Andrew Garfield and Claire Foy, and is directed by Andy Serkis. I'm hugely proud of this film - the performances by the leads are remarkable, as is Andy's directing - and the result delivers an unusually powerful experience. It's based on a true story, in fact the story of the producer Jonathan Cavendish's father, a story he first told me ten years ago now. His father, Robin Cavendish, contracted polio just before Jonathan was born, and became paralysed from the neck down. On learning he would only survive by having a machine breathe for him for the rest of his life, he begged his wife to let him die. She insisted that he live so that their son could know him. He lived, and what should have been a disaster turned into an extraordinary affirmation of life, centred on an extraordinary marriage. Yes, I know, it sounds like a downer. I can only tell you it's glorious, and you'll have to see it to believe me.