A love story just waiting, and waiting, to be told

Many movies have long and tortured histories - but few are quite as lengthy or painful as She's So Lovely. Two directors died before it could be made, another could not secure financial backing. It took more than 20 years to get this film to the screen, with the director son of the director-screenwriter father using the star his father originally intended.

She's So Lovely - originally entitled She's De Lovely until the Cole Porter estate requested a name change - was a script written by the late John Cassavetes towards the end of the 1970s.

He was going to direct it and called young and rising actor Sean Penn up at his Los Angeles home in the early 80s to read for the main part of the loopy Eddie Quinn. 'He liked me and I liked him,' says Penn of the legendary actor-director, who made Woman under the Influence, Minnie and Moskovitz and Husbands.

But Cassavetes was dying of cirrhosis and asked Hal Ashby to direct instead. Ashby developed cancer during pre-production and, by 1989, both were dead. Penn, nursing ambitions of a directing career that would come to fruition with The Indian Runner in 1991 and The Crossing Guard in 1995, decided to take over She's So Lovely himself: in black and white.

Needless to say, nobody was willing to cough up the cash to the unpredictable actor who, at this stage in his career, was more notorious for fisticuffs and a mad marriage to Madonna than his prowess behind the camera.

But time changes all things. Cassavetes' son, Nick, made his own successful transition from acting to directing with Unhook the Stars in 1995 (featuring his mother, Gena Rowlands), and quickly turned his attention to the script of She's So Lovely.

'The first time I really became aware of this material was when Sean first started going up to my father's house and they were planning on doing it,' recalls Nick Cassavetes. 'Sean has been very interested in this project for a long time: it means a lot to him. We made minor adjustments to the script, the rest is what you see.' The director adds: 'The first film was for my mother. This one is for my father.' If She's So Lovely already sounds Hollywood-incestuous, it only gets worse. Because, when Penn agreed to star in the film for Cassavetes junior, he decided there was only one woman to play his on-screen wife, Maureen Quinn - Penn's wife in real life, Robin Wright-Penn.