IT HAS had three directors and two screenwriters, and taken four years to get off the ground, but His Dark Materials, the eagerly awaited fantasy film based on the book trilogy by Philip Pullman, is finally being made.

Fans of the books were offered the proof yesterday, when Hollywood released the first still from The Golden Compass, the first of the films based on the bestselling books.

The shoot is due to continue in Britain until the end of January, and the film is not likely to open before December next year, but the still gives fans the first glimpse of Nicole Kidman, the Oscar-winning actress, as the glamorous but manipulative Mrs Coulter, and Dakota Blue Richards, a 12-year-old unknown from Sussex, as Lyra Belacqua, the fiercely independent heroine of the books.

She may not have had any acting experience, but Dakota was picked for the biggest child role in a film since Harry Potter. She stood out from 10,000 young hopefuls who attended casting calls in the South of England by New Line Cinema, which also made the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Having been a big fan of the books, she loved the National Theatre stage production and wanted to play the character “more than anything else in the world”.

Based on the award-winning Pullman novels, the trilogy includes The Northern Lights (known in the US as The Golden Compass, which is the title of the film), The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass.

Taking its inspiration from Milton, William Blake, theology and Norse legend, it tells the story of a young girl who travels to the Arctic to save her best friend. Along the way she encounters shape-shifting creatures, witches and other-worldly characters in parallel universes.

The trilogy has sold more than nine million copies worldwide, its appeal being that, like Gulliver’s Travels or Alice in Wonderland, it can be enjoyed on different levels by readers of all ages — yet another example of the way in which children’s books are increasingly joining the mainstream.

But adapting it for the big screen was easier said than done. The Golden Compass is written and directed by Chris Weitz, the Hollywood film-maker whose own script reportedly led to a draft by Sir Tom Stoppard, the Oscar-winning playwright, being quietly shelved.

Soon afterwards, Pullman found himself having to deny vigorously that anti-religious overtones had been removed from Weitz’s script for fear of upsetting American Christian groups — and the producers found they needed someone to replace Weitz.

The director walked out of the production, overwhelmed by the huge “technical challenges” involved, but he was brought back to rescue it when Anand Tucker, the film-maker who succeeded him, left over “differences in creative direction”.

The production is now firmly back on track, taking place at Shepperton Studios, having started in Oxford, Pullman’s home — he wrote each morning in his garden shed until it became too crowded with books — and an important setting for the story’s action.

Pullman has visited the set every day, but he is leaving the film-making to the film- makers.

He has described Weitz’s script as “a model of how to condense a story of 400 pages into a script of 110 or so”, adding: “His vision of the way it should be told on screen matched my own.”

Asked how he felt about letting people make a film based on his books, he said: “If I didn’t want it to happen, I could always have said no. If I’ve written the story well enough, then a film won’t spoil it; and if the film happens to be good, so much the better.”

He added: “I put my trust in New Line Cinema, not because of their unrivalled expertise with computer-generated imagery, but because the conversations I had with everyone involved led me to believe that they shared my understanding of the democratic nature of reading, and shared my faith in the free play of the human imagination.”

The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass will follow, although no filming dates have been set.

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