If you link to this blog and bypass the main page, I just want to point you to Peter Bowen’s excellent interview with director Steve Shainberg, whose Fur opens today.

An excerpt:

Filmmaker: You didn’t want to make the film look like Arbus’s work, but you also cast Nicole Kidman, who doesn’t look like Arbus. Why Kidman?

Shainberg: Whenever I see a biopic, no matter how much the person looks like the person they are playing, it just looks like a bad high school play to me. There is no way that Will Smith is going to look like Muhammad Ali. Some of the producers, who didn’t completely get what we were making, would say, “Here are the top five people who are short and have dark hair and big eyes.” But this wasn’t the enterprise at all. I was after someone who could go through the transformation. From that point of view, the innocence of Kidman — her childlikeness and the sensuality — was exactly Arbus, and was right for the movie. I always thought she would be perfect, but I never thought we would get her.