At the recent press day for The
Bourne Ultimatum, Julia Stiles took some time to also talk about The Bell Jar, the filmic adaptation of
Sylvia Plath’s novel to which she is attached. “That book is very meaningful to
a lot of people, and so we don’t want to disappoint them,” says Stiles. “In
terms of people not wanting to see an indictment of Ted Hughes again, although
the book is probably inspired by Sylvia Plath’s personal experience, it is not
her autobiography, and it takes place at a time in her life before she met Ted
Hughes, although she was writing it while she was married to him. So I’d really
like to keep the book separate from her autobiography. What I’m trying to do is
make it something that will pleasantly surprise fans of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, because I think her biography
has overshadowed the book a lot, and people think of her as this brooding, dark
poet, because of her death. But actually the book that she wrote is incredibly
vibrant, and has these beautiful images and hallucinations that she had that I
think would be perfect for a film.”

For those perhaps worrying, Stiles says she wants her
version — which is being penned by actress-scribe Tristine Skyler, but still
shopping for a director — to be a movie unlike the previous, 1979 version of The Bell Jar, directed by Larry Peerce
and starring Marilyn Hassett. “I saw [that movie] and I don’t want it to be
anything like that, with all due respect to the people that worked on it,”
Stiles says. “Stylishly, the way they shot it was very dark, and the images in The Bell Jar call for something like
what Julie Taymor did with Frida, [which
capture] that intense artistic drive that Sylvia Plath had, and that Esther
Greenwood has in the book. …The character in the book, you could say that she’s
almost manic depressive, in that she experiences these extreme highs and
extreme lows. And that needs to be reflected, which I don’t think you’ve seen
in any other movie that deals with depression.”