Dearden Tracks

As a child growing up in England, James Dearden thought movies were pretty boring. That's because his father, Basil, made one or two of them a year (including Sapphire and Khartoum), and young James regularly suffered the tedium of life on the set. In the end, though, the movies must have grown on him. Last year his screenplay for Fatal Attraction won an Oscar nomination, and the movie Adrian Lyne made from it became the year's third-biggest box-office hit. But screenwriting isn't enough for Dearden. He's already directed three prize winning shorts and an HBO film, and now Avenue Pictures has released Pascali's Island, his first feature as a writer-director. If Fatal Attraction was a domestic monster movie, Pascali's Island is something else again: a complex and literate character study (starring Ben Kingsley and Charles Dance) set in 1908 amid the unraveling of the Ottoman Empire. Basil's boy has matured into a surprisingly eclectic talent.