I’ve been tracking “Main Street” since 2004. It was supposedly going to shoot a half-dozen times, then ironically just after its screenwriter Horton Foote died, they finally started principal photography. The genesis of the story is interesting:

When Foote visited Durham five years ago, he was inspired to set a screenplay here after driving down Main Street on a Saturday afternoon and finding his vehicle to be the only car on the road.

The result was “Main Street,” the story about a small Southern town that has seen better days — specifically, tobacco days. When a stranger, played by [Colin] Firth, arrives with a controversial plan and offers to better the town in exchange for the use of the abandoned tobacco warehouses as storage for hazardous waste, tough decisions must be made in the midst of changing times.

The movie has a fantastic cast including Colin Firth, Ellen Burstyn, and one of my personal favorites Patricia Clarkson. It also features Amber Tamblyn, Orlando Bloom, and Andrew McCarthy.

A local writer and GITS reader Paul Sanford was kind enough to forward me a few more links re the movie including the blog NC Flix. There’s also another Raleigh News & Observer article which focuses on the movie’s director John Doyle:

John Doyle frets about plenty of things while directing his first movie. Bringing Horton Foote’s final screenplay to life is not one of them.

“He tells you in the writing what he’s trying to say so I don’t feel intimidated by the lack of his presence,” Doyle said in an interview on the first day of filming. “And oddly, because it’s all in the writing, he is very present with us. He’s very much here.”

There’s an interesting comment that Doyle makes:

Doyle, who won a Tony for directing “Sweeney Todd” on Broadway, had been offered other films but they weren’t quite right: unsuitable extravaganzas, he said, or “something I couldn’t link my head to.”

Finally, he chose Foote’s “Main Street” for his movie-directing debut.

“Although it’s a very finely crafted film script, there are proper scenes in it,” Doyle said. “Often with movie scripts, there are four lines, and that’s the scene. This has got speeches and dialogue and soliloquies, virtually. I’m comfortable with that because that’s the world I come from.”

Coming from a theatrical background, Doyle feels like a “proper” scene is one with “speeches and dialogue and soliloquies.” And, of course, per Hwood mainstream movies, those would cut, slashed, and burned in the first rewrite.

The movie is Main Street, the latest in at least 20 movies that have been shot at least in part in Durham.