Ever since it was announced, Charlie Wilson's War has been a presumptive Oscar nominee: it's got a heavyweight director (Mike Nichols), an Oscar-friendly cast (Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts, Philip Seymour Hoffman) and a script by him from The West Wing (Aaron Sorkin). But a month or two ago rumours started going around of reshoots, traditionally the sign of a film in trouble. We talked to Mike Nichols recently, and asked him whether there were really problems.
"We had a whole sequence in Morocco which was pretty much ruined by the weather," he told us. "In other words, we couldn’t shoot, we couldn't finish it. So we just moved to the California Mountains, and it was the first thing we did when we came back to this country. We shot all that, and we shot most of it in a combination of California and Morocco, I defy anyone to tell me the difference."
Er, that's it? They reshot some desert? Seriously? "That’s the only reshoot we had, but Hollywood being Hollywood there were rumours that we'd gone and torn the picture apart. And it was always the weather stuff."
Well, there you have it. Another rumour debunked, thanks to your friendly neighbourhood Empire. Check out the January issue, out next Friday, for the full lowdown on the film. Charlie Wilson's War is out in UK cinemas on January 11.