Nadine Williams

Feeling high over film option

SATURDAY, APRIL 24, 2010.

It is  Saturday morning I rise early and I prepare my home for a Red Letter Day – the signing of the film options papers for my debut book From France With Love.  I notice the dead gladioli in a vase and whip them out into the rubbish.

“We need new flowers for today; dead flowers are a bad omen,’’ I call out to my husband, Olivier .

I drive to Amanda’s florist and buy lilies and irises and a posey of pink flowers for the table. Next door I buy a slab of Kucken from Akkerman’s bakery.  Mum would whip up kuchen and sit it on the open oven door to rise, then mix butter, flour and sugar into the crumbled topping. Its sweet yeasty aroma would fill the kitchen when she would take it piping hot out of the oven, its crunchy topping a honey gold colour. Yes, mum would be pleased with my choice.  

We had met with young Adelaide film-maker, Peta Astbury, last night at her home, to sign and celebrate with champagne,  but her printer ran out of ink. We drank the champagne anyway and rescheduled for today. This morning we will have morning tea.  I lay the table with a crisp white embroidered table cloth,  and assemble my new porcelain tea-set from Limoges in France and place the pieces around the bowl of flowers. 

The piece de resistance is the teapot, actually a coffee pot, because I didn’t like teapot when I found the pretty white teaset with its dainty floral border design in one of many porcelain shops in Limoges. The teaset along with a few other gorgeous pieces – 17 in all – were wrapped by the sales assistant and despatched back to Australia. The teaset arrived intact, but one other item was broken.

Pieces of kuchen are placed on the matching tall-stemmed cake plate and I take a photograph of l’art de la table.

Peta Astbury arrives and among light banter, we discuss her forthcoming trip to Cannes, where she will seek funding for the film.   We pass some more time exchanging pleasantries, a mask for my exhilaration at this unexpected development – the possibility that my love story may make the big screen. I tell her the story of my fountain pen bought by Olivier as a gift for me when the first manuscript of From France With Love was rejected by Penguin.  “I have faith in you,’’ he had said. “Just rewrite it!’’.

Now I think. “Enough chit-chat. Just sign it!’’ And we sign our respective option papers to clinch the deal.  “It’s like a marriage, isn’t it,’’ I quip.

“Well, we are in this together,’’ she says. “I have good feelings about it.’’ And I answer: “Now, we will wish it well and see what the universe delivers.’’

From France With Love has been an uplifting chapter of my life, and an unparalleled success story for me and the potential of a film has me feeling as high as a kite.

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