Jessica
Watson's round-the world solo sailing adventure is to be made into a feature
film. Picture: Russell Shakespeare Source:
The Daily Telegraph
James Wigney, News Limited Network, reports
The life of round-the-world sailor Jessica Watson is to be turned into a major movie that will be filmed in Sydney and the Gold Coast next year.
Watson, who was 16 when she became the youngest woman to unofficially circumnavigate the globe solo and unassisted, will be immortalised on film in True Spirit, due for release late 2013. The movie will be made by the same production team behind Soul Surfer, the hit biopic of Bethany Hamilton, who lost an arm in a shark attack and returned to be a champion.
American producer David Brookwell said he had been looking out for another “inspirational family film” to make and had followed Watson’s dangerous journey with interest from afar. He said the net would be cast far and wide to find a young Australian to play Watson, with the role most likely to go to an unknown actor.
“There are not a whole lot of big movie stars that could play her, so there is an opportunity to find somebody new,” Brookwell said.
“We might find the next Sandra Bullock at the age of 14. But we are looking for an Australian girl.”
Watson, 19, said the prospect of someone else playing her was “a very strange idea” and says she was uncertain as to whether she wanted to be involved when first approached. But she said she had been inspired by their earlier film on Hamilton and agreed to come on board as a consultant.
“It’s quite surreal but I’m really looking forward to doing my part to make it as accurate as possible,” Watson said at the Australian International Movie Convention on the Gold Coast today.
“I want to share it all with whoever they choose because that will help get the story across. It’s not stuff that you openly talk about all the time. It’s been a couple of years so I have closed a lot of those emotions up and I am looking forward to opening them again.”
Watson, who sailed through freezing waters and raging storms on her 210-day odyssey, admitted the movie would bring back both good and bad memories as well as bringing to light as-yet untold elements of the journey.
“It’s going to be looking at it in quite a different way as well,” she said.
“All those memories are part of it but there are so many more stories and so much more emotion in a story that everyone thinks they know.”
Brookwell said the movie would focus on the inspirational aspects of the voyage and was a chance to redress some of the controversy surrounding the trip. At the time Watson came in for criticism for being too young and inexperienced for such a monumental undertaking and her parents blasted for allowing her to make the trip.
“It’s really important to understand the preparation of her voyage because there was so much on the negative side and I don’t think the critics fully understood what she did and the fact that Jessica really drove this project – it was hers,” says Brookwell.
“Her parents were not living vicariously through her. The clear message here is that if you have a dream and work hard at it, you can make that happen.”
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