From Entertainment Weekly‘s fall movies preview and the blurb therein on The Golden Compass:
”It follows the novel as closely as it can,” promises Daniel Craig, who grew an un-Bondlike beard to play Lord Asriel, Lyra’s explorer uncle, ”but there’s still a lot missing. That’s always the case when you adapt a book into a movie. You have to focus more on the storytelling.” Conspicuously absent, for instance, is any reference to Catholicism; instead, the malevolent organization that snatches children to surgically remove their souls is referred to in the movie only as the Magisterium. ”It has been watered down a little,” admits Nicole Kidman, who stars as the icily evil Mrs. Coulter. Not that she’s complaining. Quite the contrary. ”I was raised Catholic,” she says. ”The Catholic Church is part of my essence. I wouldn’t be able to do this film if I thought it were at all anti-Catholic.” She wouldn’t be able to do any possible sequels, either, but Kidman and Craig have both signed on for two.
Nothing particularly new here, though this is the first time I have come across Kidman referring to her own Catholicism; prior to this, I knew of Kidman’s Catholic roots mainly because the Aussie priest who officiated at her wedding to Keith Urban last year told reporters that Kidman had made a “spiritual homecoming”.
I wonder if Kidman read the original books before signing on to do the sequels, which, at least in novel form, make the anti-religious aspects more explicit. She couldn’t have read the screenplays for the sequels, since last I heard, they were still being written.
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