Kidman and Owen on love's battlefield

LOS ANGELES -- Philip Kaufman knows a thing or two about shooting love scenes, turning up the electricity between Henry Miller and Anais Nin in "Henry & June," the Czech bed-hopper and the innocent country girl in "The Unbearable Lightness of Being," and Chuck Yeager and his rocket-powered plane in "The Right Stuff."

But the director may have outdone himself in his latest project, HBO's "Hemingway & Gellhorn." In the movie's most erotic scene, the title characters finally give in to their urges and rip each other's clothes off -- even as their hotel, being shelled by artillery, falls and burns around them.

Their love is, literally, on fire.

"It's awesome," said Nicole Kidman, cast as pioneering foreign correspondent Martha Gellhorn, who succumbed to famed writer Ernest Hemingway during the Spanish Civil War. "That scene says something about who they were. They fed off that drama and energy. That's where they're most comfortable and most passionate."

Passion is the emotion that drives this 2 1/2-hour movie and its title characters, who drink too much, care too much and dare too much as they feverishly cover World War II.

In one pivotal scene, Gellhorn, suffering from writer's block, visits Hemingway's room, hoping for a sympathetic ear. No such luck.

"Get into the ring!" he barks, banging furiously on his typewriter while standing like a bullfighter preparing for a charge. "Try to throw some punches for what you believe in!"

Owen, who spent months researching the role, said he had to be careful not to make Hemingway too dramatic.

"It was very much a part you had to attack," he said. "But there's a danger in going over the top."

Kidman said that she cherishes playing strong-willed characters, noting that her portrayal of Virginia Woolf in "The Hours," a role that won an Oscar, helped her be better prepared to play Gellhorn.

"It's kind of a necessity, in the journey of my career, to find these women and tell their stories," she said. "It's a blessing because they're very hard stories to get made, but I love these women that defy the odds and that burn bright."

Ultimately, Gellhorn ends up being too strong for Hemingway. He becomes a victim of the persona he created: a thrill-seeking ideologue whose selfish desires trump anyone and anything else.

"We all know about the Hemingway code of behavior and Martha Gellhorn came to learn that and sort of transcend it," Kaufman said. "She out-Hemingways Hemingway."

The couple's brief marriage ends when he goes behind her back and steals a reporting post from her, too insecure to stand in her shadow for even a moment.

"It was probably a huge regret to him that it did end," Owen said. "He just wanted to be Ernest Hemingway and for her to live her life through him as well. But she was too independent and fiercely intelligent to do that."

Kidman's Gellhorn, who serves as narrator, sums it up best as she reflects on their relationship: "We were good in war and when there was no war, we made our own."

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