Kidman opens Rome film fest with photographer tale

ROME, Oct 13 (Reuters) Nicole Kidman today opened Rome's first international film festival with an intense portrayal of photographer Diane Arbus, who shocked America in the 1960s with her disturbing pictures of people on the fringes of society.

Director Steven Shainberg's ''Fur'' mixes reality with fantasy to explore Arbus's transformation from the posh, repressed housewife of a fashion photographer into one of the most daring artists of her time.

That metamorphosis is seen through Arbus's intimate friendship with her bizarre neighbour Lionel, played by Robert Downey Jr., whose body is completely covered with hair because of a medical condition.

Like most of the events and characters in the film, loosely based on Patricia Bosworth's biography of the photographer, their relationship is invented.

''It's not a biography,'' Kidman told reporters after a press screening of the film, which was premiering in Rome today.

''It's more about walking into your own creativity, discovering what you are like inside and what you want to say to the world,'' she said.

Arbus became an icon of modern photography for her ground-breaking portraits of a world of outcasts -- among her favourite subjects were dwarves, giants, prostitutes, transvestites, homeless and mentally ill people.

''In the same way you have acting in your blood, you have art, whatever that is, in your blood from the minute you are born,'' Kidman said, adding: ''Arbus had that.'' Shainberg, whose uncle was a close friend of Arbus, said he grew up with her pictures hanging on the walls of his home at a time when the photographer was struggling to win recognition for her unconventional art.

ENCASED IN A BOX As an adult, Shainberg collected her photographs and long nurtured the idea of making a film about her.

''What is so compelling about her is that she was a personality that exploded at the age of 35. Until then this unbelievably poetic, complicated and mysterious intelligence was encased in a kind of steel box inside herself,'' he said.

''In the film, you feel this necessity to open the door and go out into the world, live life the way she wanted,'' said the director, whose previous works include the critically acclaimed ''The Secretary''.

Kidman said it had been a ''deep spiritual experience'' to interpret a real character, particularly someone as talented and tormented as Arbus, who committed suicide in 1971 at the age of 48.

The Australian star, who won an Oscar for her role as writer Virginia Woolf in the 2002 film ''The Hours'', noted that both had taken their own lives. ''Characters like these don't leave you, they imprint on you,'' she said.

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